#67: Autonomy, Autopoiesis & the Enactive Approach with philosopher Ezequiel Di Paolo

After Andrea’s introduction, Mirko Prokop talks to Ezequiel Di Paolo about the enactive approach in cognitive science and its roots in Francisco Varela’s work on biological autonomy. They explore the ideas of autonomy and autopoiesis, the deeper meaning of enaction, how biological, sensorimotor and social dimensions of embodiment drive the ongoing, creative process that is human becoming, and what this implies about the meaning of love, authenticity, and the importance of staying true to your questions.

Ezequiel is a Research Professor at Ikerbasque, the Basque Science Foundation and member of the IAS-Research Centre for Life, Mind and Society at the University of the Basque Country as well as the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at the University of Sussex. He is known for key developments of the enactive approach and has published numerous articles and books on this and related topics in cognitive science and philosophy. Most recently, together with Evan Thompson he has reedited the new, annotated edition of Francisco Varela’s book Principles of Biological Autonomy, first published in 1979.

00:00 Intro by Andrea

05:02 Varela’s Principles of Biological Autonomy: From First Encounter to New Edition

11:25 Autopoiesis and Autonomy

19:20 Enaction: Bringing Forth a World

26:38 The Co-Construction of Organism and Environment

33:46 Dimensions of Embodiment

38:35 Enactive Becoming

43:57 The Primordial Tension of Participatory Sense-Making

52:32 What’s Love Got to Do With It?

1:00:36 Authentic Becoming

1:04:40 Staying True to Your Questions

Links to mentioned work by Varela & Co:

Principles of Biological Autonomy (Varela, F., E. Di Paolo and E. Thompson (eds.), 1979/2025, MIT Press)

The Embodied Mind (Thompson, E. Varela, F., and Rosch, E. 1991/2018, MIT Press)

Organism: A Meshwork of Selfless Selves (Varela, F., 1991)

Patterns of Life: Intertwining Identity and Cognition (Varela, F., 1997)

Life after Kant: Natural Purposes and the autopoietic foundations of biological individuality (Weber, A. and Varela, F., 2002)

Autopoiesis, Adaptivity, Teleology, Agency (Di Paolo, E., 2005)

Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition (De Jaegher, H., and Di Paolo, E., 2007)

Sensorimotor Life (Di Paolo, E., Buhrmann, T., Barandiaran, X., 2017, OUP)

Linguistic Bodies (Di Paolo, E., De Jaegher, H., and Cuffari, E., 2018, MIT Press)

Enactive Becoming (Di Paolo, E., 2021)

F/acts: Ways of Enactive Worldmaking (Di Paolo, E., 2023)

Mirko Prokop is currently a PhD stud

Transcript

Andrea: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. This is Andrea. Today, you're in for a real treat because you get to hear Mirko Prokop 

Who is a PhD student finishing his PhD in philosophy. You might remember him from the conversation he had on this podcast with Mike Wheeler. He's a guest host sometimes, and he's doing this interview with Ezequiel Di Paolo

That name Ezequiel Di Paolo may sound familiar to you because I've discussed his work here quite a bit. Ezequiel is one of the foremost philosophers in enactive cognition, which is part of four E cognition, the number four with a big E after it, which you've also heard me talk about here, 

the E stand for words such as embodied, extended, enactive, ecological, 

As we also talk about here on the show, there are many computational theories of mind, those have been sort of dominating philosophy or just the way that we think about the mind for a long time, and a group of people have been working [00:01:00] hard to bring the body back, so to speak, and help us understand how our bodily movement and our interaction in the world is already cognitive it. We experience a mind. It's not just in our brain, it's in our body, it's in our interaction.

It's enactive. As Ezequiel and Mirko talk about here, you're making yourself , you're making the environment different, the environment's making you different.

It's this ongoing, multidimensional happening in all sorts of ways, and it doesn't fit easily into the usual either, or categories that we use or have used historically to talk about what mind is. So Ezequiel is one of the people who's been working hard to articulate this a bit differently, to understand what this is, this interactive nature of us co-creating one another and the world co-creating us and so on. So there's this word autopoesis which you'll hear Ezequiel and Mirko discuss, which was proposed to describe this sort of [00:02:00] self-producing process of a living system.

And it leads into the idea of autonomy, which is the sort of like the rules that. We set up as our own activity. I know that can be a little bit confusing, but the point is just how are we separate from the world and also in this co-creative interaction with the world. I know it can sound a bit abstract and. It's hard to talk about precisely because it's so close to us, this intimate, ongoing interaction this condition of being both an individual and part of the world at the same time.

So bringing forth the world that is your world, but also the world outside you, and being brought forth by that world, and also all the worlds of all the cells and all the other beings that we depend upon and live with. So we're trying to see all of that in its ongoing dynamic process and sit with it and take it in for all its beauty, but also acknowledge that yes, this is a bit [00:03:00] overwhelming and life is a bit overwhelming, and this whole

process of sense making with one another can also be at times, and Mirko and Ezequiel talk about that experience too. I should also say that many of the themes that are part of this come from work of others such as Humberto Maturana, but especially Francisco Varela, and Ezequiel and Evan Thompson, who again, was another guest on this show

have just released a book, an annotated edition of a book of Francisco's called Principles of Biological Autonomy. So you'll hear Ezequiel and Mirko mention that at the beginning, you'll also hear Ezequiel and Mirko mention Hanne de Jaegher who is another philosopher who has worked closely on these ideas of participatory sense making.

That phrase came up, for example, in my conversations with Bec Todd, Shay Welsh, Elena Cuffari and others who are working in the same tradition. [00:04:00] So hopefully all of that's starting to rhyme a little bit or make a little more sense. Ah Hanne's work on loving and knowing

is becoming an inspiration for this show in a way. So she and I have had some conversations and one of those we'll post next week.

So it's wonderful that these nest together here in this conversation. If you haven't read Ezequiel's work yet, I highly recommend it. I hope it brings something good to you. it's late here. It's been a busy week.

The sun was shining today. It was really crisp. The air was not too hot. Just a glorious day really. Everything bright and green and I feel really thankful that I get to experience those days. Life is not so easy all the time, but there's a lot of beauty in it and I wanna send you some beauty if it's in my power at all today.

I think this conversation is beautiful, so I didn't make it, but I send it to you. Alright? Be [00:05:00] well. 

Mirko Prokop: Hi Thank you so much for taking the time to, to speak to me and, and come on the podcast. 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: My pleasure. 

Mirko Prokop: As you know, I've been really interested in your work for quite some time and, uh, trying to yeah, keep up with also the current research you're doing and, and the enactive approach,, which I hope we, we get to talk about some of these things.

But I wanted to start and go a little bit back to maybe the roots of the enactive approach and the roots of your own thinking in the work of, , Francisco Varela. , And especially his book, principles of Biological Autonomy that you've recently, yeah. Reedited republished with, together with Evan Thompson.

Which is great because it was since the publication in 19, I think it was 79, uh, I think it was out of print actually,

Ezequiel Di Paolo: Yes. It was very, very hard to get that book. [00:06:00] I, I never owned the copy my, uh, myself. I, I had a photocopy that I got when I was a student.

, And then when I, I tried to buy one, the copies were so expensive.

Mirko Prokop: I was also, because I was getting into Varela's work and my master's and I, I was looking for a copy because I always want to read books and sort of copy. 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: Yeah. 

Mirko Prokop: I was like, yeah, that's too expensive for for That's 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: true. That's true. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 

Mirko Prokop: I'd be curious to know about, your first encounter with the book, if you, I don't know if there's like a moment you can pinpoint,

Ezequiel Di Paolo: yeah. This, this is, this is, um, a good starting point 'cause um, I, I wasn't aware of this work until I started doing my PhD at the University of Sussex.

Um, I was, um, doing my PhD, what was then called the school of, uh, cognitive sciences, cognitive and computing sciences, which was a very special place because it was very interdisciplinary, very, you would share [00:07:00] offices with psychologists, linguists, roboticists, AI people, and so on. And, and, one of the founders was, uh, Margaret Boden.

So many people there, um. You know, enjoy some sort of challenging and free discussions and debates. Uh, let's put it like, like that. Um, and it was then that, that, uh, people started to mention ideas such as osis, I believe it was, uh, Mike Wheeler actually who gave, um, a seminar introducing the concepts of Autopoesis, uh, autopoesis for the under fives.

That was the title of the seminar. Um, and at that point I was already reading, uh, some math Varela, and, it was a bit of a bet. I had to, I had to imagine that I had to go through this very difficult, convoluted language, this obscure prose, because probably at the end of it. The [00:08:00] ideas would, there will be a payoff or I will be transformed by the process of reading it in such a way that I, things would make sense to me.

And I wouldn't say that they made total sense to me, but they, they, I could see the potential. And then I started just tracing anything I could get by this authors. And then of course, the library of, uh, suspects had a copy of Principles of Biological Autonomy. And, and, and that's an interesting book because, uh, you cannot really guess from, from the publication dates because, uh, Autopoiesis and Cognition, the book written by Varela and Maturana appears in 1980 in English.

But in fact, it was written before, it was written in the mid seventies, more or less

Mirko Prokop: and was it in, in Spanish, the original,

Ezequiel Di Paolo: there was a, yeah, there was a version in Spanish. The Macinas y Seres Vivos, uh, published in Chile. There was a version in English before the Spanish version in terms of, uh, reports of the technical reports of the, [00:09:00] what's it called?

The Biology Computing Lab in University of Illinois. Um, so all of that seems like, okay, well this idea seems all these books are appearing more or less at the same time. But in fact, auto cognition is a bit like a, a first stage, which in the book, principles of Biological Autonomy, Varela picks up on that.

And in fact, several of the first chapters are kind of repeating, going over again with slight changes, but going over again the main points of the theory of autopoiesis. But at that point there's also in, in Varela there, there's, there's a need to, to, to move in other directions.

He had in interest in try to formalize some of these ideas using formal systems, mathematics, and, you know, and so on category theory. Uh, and he wanted to apply this, uh, in a more [00:10:00] open-ended manner because the theory of Autopoiesis was becoming too self enclosed. I, I would say, this is my opinion, in any case, not everybody would probably agree with it, uh, in the sense that it was talking to itself in circles and circles and so on.

Um, and Varela had a more, um, I would say exploratory spirit as, as a scientist. I think he wanted to look at, uh, examples in biological systems such as the immune system, um, neuro oscillations, things like that, and the biology of the cell and the extracellular matrix, things like that. So I. So the book is, this moment of departure from the, a more abstract beginnings.

This doesn't mean, I mean, and Varela was also an experimental neuroscientist, uh, and so was Maturana. Uh, but the, the theory itself was rather abstract and putting them together back [00:11:00] into work. And in doing this, he also kind of sets on his own course and towards the end of the book, you start reading something about naturalized epistemologies and things like that, that are very reminiscent with hindsight, that are very reminiscent of what we talk about in, in an active approach over the last couple of decades.

Mirko Prokop: Mm-hmm. 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: So, so that's a little bit about the book. And of course for me it was very inspiring. It was like, um, not the mathematical part because I, I was not really able to, to apply it directly. I mean, uh, I could follow it, but it was not like, okay, it was too abstract. But the, third part of the book was quite novel to, to me, because he was seeing autonomy as, as, as a, as, um, generalization of idea of autopoiesis, which means like the self production of, of a living cell, the self production, self distinction of a living cell.

He said like, well, [00:12:00] but there many systems that are similar in what they do in, in, in ident, in self individuating at different, in different domains. And yet he was very cautious of applying the idea for autopoiesis directly. 

Mirko Prokop: To 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: those systems. Like many people were very tempted to do like, you know, the recurrent patterns in family relations, for instance.

There, there will be people, uh, psychotherapist who say, whoa, the family's an autopoietic system. Like he said, no, this is not precise. We need another concept. And that was his proposal in this book. The, concept of autonomy, which then is very influential later on down the line for enactivists. , So yeah, I think it was time for this book to become more available again.

Um, and the idea came to not just reissue the book, but essentially introduce it with some essays and lots of [00:13:00] marching annotations. About 200 of them that connect the, the ideas in the book with later developments in Varela's work, but also. You know, contemporaneous interests and concerns in, in biology, in, in ecology, in psychology, neuroscience, and so on.

So that's, that's the, the purpose of the new edition. 

Mirko Prokop: That's great. I think it only came out a couple of weeks ago, and now it's 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: indeed. I only got my, got my, see if I can show it my, my personal copy. A few days ago. I mean, I don't know what it took so long, but, uh, no, it's bigger than I, but 

Mirko Prokop: that's 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: the stuff with the annotations on the side to clarifications and things like that.

Mirko Prokop: I only had time to, to read the, the introduction, uh, and also the, the nice foreword by Amy Cohen Varela. 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: Yes. Yes. Um, 

Mirko Prokop: You and Evan Thompson in the introduction talk about this as a kind of. enactive [00:14:00] ur-text, or maybe you can think about the book as introducing many concepts that have become really central in the enactive approach.

, First and foremost, the idea of autonomy. Um, so can you give a, a rough maybe explanation of the idea of autonomy and also how it relates to this idea of organizational closure or operational closure? 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: Yes. Yes. Sure. Okay. Well, I, as I said, the idea of autonomy is a generalization of idea autopoiesis maybe if I, if I say what autopoiesis is very quickly, it would be easier to understand autonomy.

Um, so autopoiesis was proposed as. A kind of organization that, uh, that a system can have such that it continues to produce and maintain. It's this same organization. It's a bit of a circular idea. But with that, the point was to try to [00:15:00] capture the, the constant self production and, and, and, and self distinction properties of, of living organisms.

We are made of stuff that we constantly, that are, that is constantly flowing through our bodies. And at the same time, we're not just simply made like produce, but we also distinguished from the environment. Uh, in the case of a single cell, there is the, the production of this. Uh, membrane and the cytoskeleton and things like that.

And even now we know that there are processes that are similar to some kind of immune system at the level of a single cell and so on. All of those things are trying to work such that the, the cell doesn't quite dissolve into the environment that's become indistinct. 

Mirko Prokop: Mm-hmm. 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: , So as I was saying, this is a very interesting and powerful idea that comes from a tradition of systems thinking in cybernetics.

Um, and for, for that, I, I used the word [00:16:00] organization essentially what, what matters here in the autopoietic theory that, uh, what you an organization is what is conserved, and it's tied to the identity of. The living organism identity in several senses, uh, but in maybe the most important one being that the identity of the organism as such that we know that it's the same because it, it it's conserving its organization kind of a token identity.

Um, so, but you, you might say, well, well, but isn't the organism constantly changing? Indeed. So what's changing is not the organization, but what they, they call the structure. So they, they, they present these two concepts, structure on organization as dual concepts. One, one kind of needs the other to be properly defined.

So I say, well, you know, changes in structure can happen all the time. Provided that you remain autopoietic, then you, there's no problem. [00:17:00] So all the phenomena of life that we normally interested in, like, uh, growth, uh, reproduction, um. Uh, cognition and so on. These are manifested as changes in the structure, plastic changes in interactions with environment.

What characterizes the organization is what sometimes is called organizational closure or operational closure, which is this self-reference that I was saying the, uh, earlier that the organization is such that the processes that form the organized network operate in such a way that they result in the rein instantiation of the whole network.

I mean, the circularity there, and that's the idea of closure comes from mathematics. It doesn't mean that the system is closed to the environment. 

Mirko Prokop: Yeah. 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: So autonomy essentially is imagine that story told, not necessarily at the level or in the domain of, uh, molecular [00:18:00] interactions that that happen in, in the level, uh, of the cell, of the living cell, but told at in other domains.

Uh, the interactions between, um, , antigens and, and, um, and the immune system. And the immune system with itself can also be understood , , as a closed network that is sustained in itself. And this is an idea that then Varela connects to existing work, um, on immune networks. Uh, that was very interesting and quite radical to the radically different from, from the traditional perspective.

So you could, you could, you could apply this idea. I. , In different places. And what Varela proposes is what he calls the closure thesis. It says, well, in order to tell that a system is autonomous in this technical sense, , it's enough to see or to ask whether that the system is operationally closed, whether we find in it this organization [00:19:00] that I was talking about that is circular.

So, so that's a little bit the, the rough, uh, the lots of technical details, but, um, but that's a little bit the, the rough idea of, of autonomy in this technical sense. I have to emphasize, because of course, the idea of autonomy is broader than this 

Mirko Prokop: I think it also, has been developed also in many, many different ways in this Yes.

Course that I guess we, we will talk about Okay. As well.

Um, yeah, I was, , interested in that because in the, the book, the Embodied Mind and which is I think in 91 with Varela, um, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch mm-hmm. Introduces first this idea of enaction in the enactive approach, which is, you know, then in the last two or three decades, been developed in various kinds of ways, but they actually don't, uh, explicitly I think mentioned this idea of autonomy so much.

Hmm. Um, so I would be curious to, and understand a bit [00:20:00] better the relationship between the autonomy perspective on, on organisms and the kind of, um. Way that it implies of how we think about the relationship between 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: Yes, sure, sure. 

Mirko Prokop: And so on. And this idea of that in the active approach is called Bringing Forth a World, right?

Ezequiel Di Paolo: Indeed. Yes. Yes. Okay. So, so, so it, it, it's a long story. Um, but a, a couple of things to keep in mind, uh, as you said, I mean the, the, the embodied mind, which is like the founding text of the enactive approach, um, appears in 1991. It does, I think, doesn't mention that the idea of autopoiesis at all. I don't think it even appears in a note.

I don't know. Um, and it talks a little, sometimes it talks about autonomous systems, and you might, you might, [00:21:00] you know, be forgiven to be by matching up, okay, maybe Varela left all that autonomous stuff behind him and, and just moved on to something else. But that's not quite true. I mean, the, the, in 1991, he also publishes a paper called, um, Organism: Meshwork of Selfless Selves.

Mirko Prokop: Mm-hmm. 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: Where there, it's almost as if, as if there are dif different births, births of the, an active thinking one is, one is the one that that faces the, the cognitive science audience and neuroscience audience and say, look how we have missed, um, understanding cognition from a dynamical embodied and experiential perspective and lo and, and, and how important it would be to continue the, the project of phenomenologies like [00:22:00] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, uh, in the context of a cognitive science that is dominated by computer metaphors.

Mirko Prokop: Okay. 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: Um, and, and so the, the, there is that, and then there is Varela also write writing on his own in 1991. And then in 99, in 97, again, a whole sketch of what I often sometimes call an active theory. So we got an active approach, but there's a theory within the active approach which puts together these concepts, autonomy, sensemaking, agency, blah, blah, blah.

So, and he was already catching that relation. And the two things can only make sense together because you make read the embodied mind and saying like, so what do they mean by bringing forth the world? Do they mean it purely in epistemic sense, in a sense of, for instance, yeah, we have different views on the world.

If, if our sensory [00:23:00] systems are different, we wanna see different things. We, we even see things, um. Well, there's a bit of that, but, uh, uh, if you put that in contra in connection with the other stuff that Varela is working on at the same time, , you realize that this, this a stronger claim. , The claim being that, uh, I'm gonna speak it very, very bluntly.

You know, the, the whole of cognitive science got the, its problems wrong. You know, the problem of perception being the reconstruction of objective features of the world that then I have to process and, and then that fits into some representational economy in my brain and so on. It says, organisms don't do that.

Organisms are constantly acting in the world, constantly doing stuff. They're not in the business of reconstructing objective features of the world. They, they can. Essentially survive and do very well [00:24:00] by tuning in, in their dynamics, their body dynamics to the dynamics of what's relevant to them.

And in doing so, they're not just selecting what's relevant out of the all possible interactions that they can have, that there are only a few that matter to them. They're also changing the world. They're also, they're also introducing changes by, by acting in the world ideas that much later, not much later, a few years later, we became more popular in biology in terms of, uh, niche construction, for instance.

The, the, the environment is not independent of developing populations well for the enactive approach, bringing forth the words. Another way of saying the, the environment and, and the embodi agents, uh, are codependent. They're mutually defining and changing themselves ongoingly. And if you get that problem right, then the whole approach.

Implies maybe looking for other things that don't necessarily what's what's [00:25:00] happening, whether the brain is representing stuff or reconstructing the world. Maybe the brain has a different business that is doing something else. Uh, and that was, if you like, the key idea of the embodied mind, that one. And also the idea that you have to bring lived experience into, into the fold.

You can't just simply later figure out whether this is connected to the way we actually experience our, our, our lives as embodied beings. It has to be there from the beginning in terms of, , shaping the questions we ask, shaping the methodologies we care about, and so on. 

Mirko Prokop: Mm-hmm. 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: But then the, the other stuff is also there.

And I think what happens later and, and one of the, the, the last papers that Varela wrote were, um, uh. In the early two thousands, just before, before he passed, um, with Andreas Weber. It, it's a kind of attempt to bring them together, right? So the idea of autonomy [00:26:00] comes back again. Autonomy and idea of sense making, if you like, the bringing forth of worlds that is, is an activity more than something that happens in my head.

, And combined with new actors to put it like this, like, like the, the philosophy of Hans Jonas, which is quite, quite important. And so, so that, that is a, that the chapter that, that brings the lines back together, that apparently if you only read The Embodied Mind, you may not see how, how everything is connected.

Mirko Prokop: So I read, uh, this paper called, um f/acts I don't really know how to pronounce this by you, just facts, which I think for me was really helpful in clarifying a little bit this stronger sense of enaction that you were talking about. Yeah. And I think you, you mentioned, in this paper also this idea that you find in, [00:27:00] in Varela's other work in the nineties, apart from the body of mind that you mentioned, um, of this kind of, I think you call it like a dialectical tension between ideas of self production and self distinction.

And I think for me that was really helpful in also, I mean, it's, it's challenging to think about this in the right kind of way because you, you're so used to thinking about the organism and the environment on the side , and the idea of them in a sense, co-constructing each other is

Ezequiel Di Paolo: it's challenging, but after a while, by looking at concrete cases, by looking at, uh, as I was saying, if you look at it in biology, it seems less challenging. 'cause you actually see, you know, beavers building dams, changing the landscape and so on and so forth. And then growing in that change landscape, of course that happens over more than just, it's not [00:28:00] just the one organism doing it.

Uh, so it's cumulative. Um, so you start seeing, once you, you, you accept the idea, then you, you start seeing it, you know, it pops up in many places from human relations to, you know, uh, microbiology now, um, indeed, uh, when. I think in the nineties there was a re edition of the Spanish version of the autopoiesis book, the Maquinas y Seres Vivos.

And at that point, both Verela and Maturana wrote, um, their own introductions, their own, uh, yeah. Forwards to the word with their own reflections and so on. Um, and Varela does ex say something like what we were just saying. Say like, we, we started with an idea that, uh, he still think it's [00:29:00] correct, but it could be easily interpreted in very internalistic ways.

Uh, like, uh, okay, I'm self-producing and I, and I just kept my nutrients from the environment and, and that's it. And, uh, I reject the rest and I. And my mind is essentially how I, I cannot distinguish hallucinations from perceptions because all this is happening inside me. And he said that, that, yeah, that criticism was kind of right, uh, because, uh, it was easy to, to, to get that idea, which is not what they intended.

Mm-hmm. Uh, but he, he says that since working on, on the enactive perspective, he wanted to emphasize that there's this historical codependence between agents and environments that they're mutually defining and, and building themselves.

So, and, and then that late to work, the work that other people have done, myself included, have [00:30:00] emphasized that, that that relationality, so that, that if autonomy becomes relational autonomy because it's constantly being enacted, uh, that that is the nice thing about the word action because you're not just enacting a world of meaning.

Um, by, by engaging the world in certain ways, thus transforming it and, and being the whole transformation being significant for your own viability, for your own continuity, you're also enacting your own body. You're enacting yourself. You're, you're, you're constantly, by doing whatever you're doing, the body becomes, or it's in constant becoming itself and changing and transforming itself.

So you see that we start with an ideas that seem to be very locked in, in, in, into a world where things are the way they are and they cannot change to, uh, from there, using the power of some of those ideas, start putting them in a different configuration such [00:31:00] that we can understand change, transformation and in human cases we can understand how we become together with others, how we participate in, in, in ongoing, uh, transformation, mutual transformations and things like that. 

Mirko Prokop: Mm-hmm. 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: So, uh, that has been, that, that is a little bit of a sketch of, of, of, of a trajectory, of enactive ideas. Um, well since, well, since this book, we mentioned The Embodied Mind and, and, and later work.

It's an opening up of, of that, of that, uh, initially very self enclosed idea 

Mirko Prokop: mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: Of, of production, which in, in, in some writings, I, I talk about at the dialectics of, of, uh, between the two conditions of autopoiesis, I said, you're making yourself and you're making yourself different from the other, from the environment.

And I say that those two things are not independent, uh, because , the conditions that would best, [00:32:00] best satisfy self production would be that every relation to the with environment is useful. You know, everything is food, so to speak. But if everything is useful is that you have to accept any interaction with environments.

Like you're essentially open to the environment. 

Mirko Prokop: Mm-hmm. 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: And the opposite happens if you are want to be, as you know, you want to, to do self distinction, the best possible way you just build a wall around yourself and do not allow any influence on the outside. But of course it will die because you cannot get the energy and the nutrients.

So each of these two requirements is, is, is pointing. In, in, in opposite directions. , And what you need to do is to see this as a dialectic , and the step that overcomes this tension that keeps the distinction. Doesn't erase the distinction between the ideas, but now the ideas are working in, [00:33:00] in a, in a new plane, in a new mode.

And, and that I propose is that enactive idea of agency and adaptivity. That you're using the environment constantly to build yourself. And in doing so, you, you, you build this, this self distinction, but you're also open. Mm-hmm. Uh, adaptively, you're trying to conserve certain path of becoming, uh, and that is a little bit the resolution of that initial dialectical tension.

Mirko Prokop: At the, uh. I guess more existential phenomenological level. This is this idea from Hans Jonas, not this idea of needful freedom. Yeah, exactly. Open. But at the same time, I think Andrea also talked about this, um, in, in another episode. Um,. i think for me this was really helpful because it really links the idea of autonomy directly to, , a notion of becoming in the enactive approach

And I think you've, that's some of the, [00:34:00] one of the themes of your more recent, um, research from what I could tell, is that you're trying to also make sense of this idea, how it relates to the idea of, , a body, what a body is. Yeah. Which is actually very hard to say. even though there's this, all this literature and embodied cognitive science.

Um, so can you, can you talk a little bit about this? Yeah. 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. Uh, I think that, uh, well, you just said it. Uh, the question, what, what is a body, you know, when we ask that question, uh, in the context of embodied cognitive science, you don't find many clear answers. Uh, that that is something surprising.

I mean, in, in, in other areas, in, in other areas of inquiry, you know, there may be be better, some better answers, but it's almost like it, body [00:35:00] cognition was trying to say, well, it is almost obvious what the body is. Come on. It's, it is, uh, our, our anatomical physiological structures, you know, our biological body, our sensor apparatus, blah, blah, blah.

Well, yeah, but, uh, uh, that doesn't, in my opinion, go deep enough because, uh, you may speak of a body of anything like this, you know, a typewriter may have a body in that sense because it has a structure and and so on. And it may interact with the world. I don't know. So I think the enactive theory, which I was saying, gives us a, a lot of, uh, tools to try to, to work out better, uh, approaches to a more principle conception of, of bodies.

Bodies in the plural. I, I would also say, because we end up proposing that we don't have just this one dimension of embodiment, we do have an organic dimension. 

Mirko Prokop: Mm-hmm. 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: You know, our physiology and, and so, uh, but we also have a [00:36:00] sensory motor dimension. And, and we, we are active in the world. We have powers, we can do things, we can, we are sensitive to things and so on.

And that seems to be, um. Not reducible to to the biology because for instance, you also depend on the environment for the possibilities that you can, you know, the affordances you have, the obstacles and so on and so forth. And then we have a social inter subjective dimension as well, you know, we, we are, we are, uh, again, these dynamics of affirmation, recognition distinction that, that they're also happening in this, in this social domain.

So we, we speak of these dimensions of regulations of embodiment or dimensions of embodiment. And, and the, the fact that that tells you that it's, it's a good, a good proposal is that, uh, these dimensions are sometimes at odds with each other. You know, uh, you, you may consider that for health [00:37:00] reasons you should go on a diet or something like this.

And, but I. That's something that comes from our linguistic, uh, knowledge. We know about it. We are told some people give us, good arguments. We recognize that that's a good argument and realize reflectively that we should do that. But the sensory motor body doesn't really agree with that.

You know that when we see the ice cream, we wanna have some ice cream. It is hard to, so the, the, so, or, or breaking a, a bad habit because it could be unhealthy, you know, like habit of smoking. So that is, um, a telltale sign that is, is quite right to see that the body is not just this unified thing. Even if you want to consider, it's a process.

It's not just this unified, but it's an entanglement of different kinds of autonomy. That is what we propose that there, the idea of autonomy comes [00:38:00] back, uh, as a proposal. This is a theory of course. At in the sensory motor domain. So we have sensory motor agency and it comes back and in the interaction domain and the linguistic domains, that is a little bit of, of, of, of the, the, "enactive trick" if you like, you, you just see whether in the new domain of interest, something seems to be conserving itself while other things change and see, propose, see if it's possible.

There's evidence that, that, that which is conserved might be conceived as an autonomous system. 

Mirko Prokop: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: Uh, so becoming involves all of these dimensions. It's just not the one dimension. Um, and in here, uh, you mentioned Hans Jonas, which is also, he's very, very useful also to distinguish these forms, transitions in forms of life from basic needful freedom to animal life or mob, mobile, mobile life, [00:39:00] essentially that can.

You can perceive, you can have different dimensions for it, for your emotional life and so on and so forth to human and so on. Uh, so you see these transitions there. But an another, another interlocutor for me has been, uh, the philosopher, , Gilbert Simondon with his theories of individuation and so on, which of course is quite complex and maybe we shouldn't go into that now.

But essentially there is, there is a confirmation of this notion that becoming is, is, is an entanglement of dimensions of becoming. And when you talk about bodies, well, the first problem is that you should not try to reduce the idea of a body to any one of these dimensions as if one was more important than the others.

Uh, I have said many times that. [00:40:00] Yes, you need an organic body to then become a sensory motor agent and you need to be a sensory motor agent to interact socially. Yes. But that's chronology that, that's not, as relevant as what happens afterwards when all these dimensions are mutually transforming each other.

So that our physiology, , is very much dependent on the jobs we have, for instance, on, on, on, on the urban environment where we, we live, uh, and, and whether we, we have jobs or not. So that affects our, our body chemistry, affects our immune system and so on. So we constantly, all these dimensions are shaping each other and, and so becoming, what does it mean?

It's not simply to, to, to highlight this process that bodies are unfinished. Uh, they're, they're always in the process of, of. Arriving but never arriving. You know, they're [00:41:00] always like, okay, let's go to this point. Let's go to this point, but then you have to start again. 

Mirko Prokop: Mm-hmm. 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: But it also speaks to, if you like, the more human dimension of becoming, which is the more existential, you know, uh, whether, whether you, you feel that, that you're, you're living the life you want to live.

Whether you are, you live in a place that gives you the possibilities to do that. Whether you, you can set yourself goals that, that you, you can try to achieve or whether that's very hard. Um, and then, I've done some work on, on that existential dimension, uh, to show that most of the times we think about it in a very individualistic sense, but in fact, becoming, I.

To make things even more complicated, can only happen. Human becoming can only happen in, in, in a community with others. 

Mirko Prokop: Also an idea that's really at the roots also of Varela's thinking. [00:42:00] No, in many ways

Ezequiel Di Paolo: in in many ways. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Because Varela was also very concerned with, with, uh, such things as, as, uh, well, communities appear in many places, even in the early book.

And, and, uh, because he talks about observers, but then he says, in fact, we should say a community of observers. He keeps, keeps realizing that he has to bring the community because the community will set the a, a set of rules and norms and interests, uh, that to which you as a researcher would have to.

Somehow connect either by saying, I follow this, or either by or saying, look, no, I think we should change by being critical of them. You can also, but not by being indifferent. So you, you, you are shaped by, by, by, by the community, which is also an idea that Simondon has, you know, like human inhibition happens as, as [00:43:00] at the, at the collective level.

You know, we become individuals thanks to the collective, not against the collective, which is the traditional way of thinking. It's like, oh, you got the individual and the collective, like the collective was only the source of obstacles to your individuality. I mean, the, the collective is also the one what, what the source of, of your desires of, of your drive, of, of your powers.

Mirko Prokop: Mm-hmm. 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: They also come from having developed in this collective. So, the, the idea becoming becomes. Quite rich. And that starts to connect to o opens up what was originally, uh , an approach, concern with the study of the mind or maybe life and mind to, find connections with several interesting questions and, and in, , in the humanities, in social science, in in medical sciences and, and, and so on and so forth

Mirko Prokop: yeah, I mean you and, uh, [00:44:00] together with Hannah De Jaegher, I think this idea of participatory sensemaking, um, which Andrea also has talked about with, uh, other guests in, in previous conversations, I guess is the enactive, um, attempt and version to understand this, this social dimension and the way that it's entangled with our organic and, and sensory motor dimensions of, of embodiment as, as you put it.

Um, and you think in the book Linguistic Bodies, , that you wrote together with Hanne De Jaegher and Elena Cuffari talk about this primorial tension, as you call it, that is implied by this notion of participatory sense making. Um, and I find this really an interesting idea, so I was wondering if you can say a little bit more about 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: Yeah, sure, sure, sure.

Um. So the work we've done with Hannah, , on participatory sense making [00:45:00] is it was, if you like, the first connection that we could establish between these ideas of, of autonomy, embodiment, sense making with the social domain, with the inter, let's put it in, let's say, interactive domain, where, where more than one agent is involved in, in affecting, in affecting each other.

Um, and, and so what we proposed there, um, in the context of social debates and social cognition was that, uh, at the root of our interactions there is a, a, a way in which we are constantly affecting our sensemaking. Uh, and sometimes it could be an indirect way, like, um, in an interaction I point to something and you understand that as maybe look in that direction.

Now you see something, you were not seeing some influence in your sense making. Um, to more sophisticated ways in which we can create something [00:46:00] together. We're working on a, on, on a project together, and we, it's hard to tell who is the author of these ideas, you know, because we constantly being developed, uh, together.

So we did apply the enactive trick, so we said like, okay, we have the autonomy of these individuals and so on, but when is a social interaction? Well, we suggested that the interaction itself, the dynamics of interaction momentarily takes uh, an autonomous dynamics too, and autonomous organization too.

Mirko Prokop: Mm-hmm. 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: And then we ask, well, if that's the case, we should have experiences where the interaction wants to go on, despite everybody wanted to stop, wanted to stop it. Mm-hmm. And we did find those experiences like the, the typical case of the, the, the narrow corridor situation with two people walking. In opposite directions.

And then by mis coordination or maybe by coordination, you end up doing this side dance for a while until somebody says, oh, you first, well, that, that's a [00:47:00] case in which the interaction something is, is, is becoming self generating, at least for a moment, temporarily. I'm not saying interaction is an agent or anything like this.

It's, it's, it's, it's, it's just this temporary organization. So we then propose that a such interaction should be defined as a situation where we as participants can maintain our autonomy as participants. We are not negated in the encounter. And also it's not just simply that we're sitting together ignoring each other, but somehow the, the, the flow of, of these dynamics, uh, uh, of these relations.

At least momentarily acquires a life of its own. . And in sociology, there were lots of, lots of support for the idea of interactions having a life of their own. Uh, so what is the primordial tension? Okay, so the primordial tension is exactly, if you like, that tension within these two forms of autonomy, that of the participants and that of the in-between the [00:48:00] encounter, uh, is not necessarily a tension between people participating.

That doesn't have to be a negative connotation to this idea of tension. But we are, individual recognizers, embodied cognisers, wanting to do things, to do stuff. One of the things we are doing is participating in an interaction, but I, I may find myself, I don't know. Maybe I like to, to drink some tea now, but I kind of just go and, and, and prepare the tea now.

So, uh, the interaction that we are having now has, is regulating that desire to say no later you have the tea later. Um, so, or in the middle of interaction we may, may have dissonances because I look at somebody behind you that I know of and you might interpret that as if I'm not paying attention to you while in fact I am listening to you.

But that, that change, that was [00:49:00] part of my own sense making, noticing somebody has had an influence on you and has an influence on the dynamics of interaction. Perhaps from that point on, you start thinking, you know, suspecting that I'm not really taking you seriously in what you're telling me just because of I had that moment.

And so, so the primorial tension is that, that that tension that we have to navigate. To, work through this potential, uh, misunderstandings, this potential dissonances lack of coordination. And when we do break down the interaction, uh, we, we had to bring the resources to try to repair it in some way.

And, and that is essentially where we actually learn something new. Uh, interaction is telling us something like, oh, sorry. Uh, you know, the typical thing is, sorry, I thought that whatever, I thought you meant something else. I [00:50:00] thought you wanted something else. And then you recover that. And we do it linguistically, but we, it could be, it could be in a dance, it could be people dancing tango that, that, that, that happens to, so the primordial is always there.

Uh, but in the book, Linguistic Bodies, what we propose is to take, start from there and start developing a dialectical understanding of this tension that takes you to increasingly more complex forms of social agency. Mm-hmm. Each form of, of social agency reproduces the original tension in a different way.

It resolves it, apparently, but then you realize that, oh, from now on there is another tension and another tension. And eventually you go from basic participatory sensemaking mutual influence in our sensemaking to things like, um, acts that regulate how we interact, like gestures and [00:51:00] so on. Partial acts we call them to, um, ways in which we regulate how, how we use those acts with familiar interact participants or unfamiliar ones to the formation of dialog, theological structures, mutual recognition as participants in the dialogue.

And eventually, you know, the, the possibility of reflecting and utterances in, in the dialogue that you say something and I reflect something about what you say, either using the same words or just in the tone or in my of my response, there's a connection. So the dialogue becomes like a, like, um, like a braided history.

And that brings several interesting things, consequences, like the possibility of, well, personhood, essentially, you know, personhood as such becomes theorized in the enactive approach at that, at that level when we can recognize each other and we can reflect, [00:52:00] because I can reflect utterances, I can also reflect my own utterances.

I, I I can eventually self-talk. Mm-hmm. 

Mirko Prokop: Have 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: this, uh, self-control that is not just simply, uh, self-regulation like the. You know, the, the blood temperature is self-regulating. No, I, I, I, I mean, I have a power, which is, , imbued with social normativity that then I applied to directing my becoming as a person.

So that's when we, we are person. So that's, sorry. In the end I ended up talking about

Mirko Prokop: I think we should, uh, maybe at some later point do another conversation. Okay, fine. Fine. .

One of the, one thing that you, or this idea of the, this tension. I think it connects very well to a comment that I think Shea Welch, um, made with Andrea in an earlier podcast where she made this interesting point that sometimes it seems like you're actually communicating better with people [00:53:00] that have sort of different styles, different perceptions, different ways of being in the world because of the effort that you have to bring into this interaction.

Um, and I think Rebecca Todd at this point said that, you know, this also shows the importance of love in, in conversation and communicating successfully. This idea that I think you find also in the work of, for example, which I really like that, you know, love, is this, this ongoing practice of trying to engage despite breakdowns, despite tensions, .

So how do you think about this since this is a podcast also about love and philosophy? Oh, 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: oh, absolutely. Uh, well, uh, I think, I think that's absolutely right. This is also is, is stepping a little bit into the ethical territory now, but what, what should be your attitude if you want to participate and know the other, um, you can't, um, [00:54:00] come to this interaction with insufficient openness, uh, to, to, to the other.

You, you must let the other have their space, their say and so on, and, and so to, even if that takes a, a lot of effort. Okay. Because that typically will take a lot of effort because you, you, you, you, you think. It's so easy, like, uh, well, you know, I'm open-minded. And, and then imagine you have to talk to somebody who says, I'm not open-minded.

How are you gonna be open-minded towards that attitude? And then you have to truly try. Uh, okay. So essentially what I'm trying to drive at here is, is that, , if you think that our understanding and our becoming advances in communities and through participation, um, if you like, a one basic, uh, [00:55:00] uh, ethical attitude that you have, uh, would be to always attempt to connect and attempt to be open.

But that in itself will introduce new tensions. And this is, I mean, Hanne De Jaegher has looked into, into this, uh, engage and engaging epistemology, precisely calling it. Loving and knowing. , So you should then say, well, I'm not trying to overdetermine what's happening here, like coming with preconceived ideas about what you want to tell me who you are, what, what, what you, what you're saying in the meaning of what you're saying.

But at the same time, you cannot just simply say everything is fine and disappear into, into, into the, the, the others that are around you. Uh, uh, so again, you find that tension and, and which is analogous to that original thing we talk about the, the, the [00:56:00] surface of self production and self distinction.

Mirko Prokop: Mm-hmm. 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: In a sense, you, you, you are in these interactions, uh, forming yourself, producing yourself, if you like, as, as, as a human being from all these relations. So you must be open to them and you must be open to change and maybe change in directions that are maybe scary, but at the same time, you should, you should also be able to affirm your direction.

So becoming is not simply change, it is affirming or attempting to, to direct or, or, or, or your process of becoming in, in a good way. And what counts as good is, will be a difficult question to ask, but it has not, it cannot just be simply good for you because of how you depend on, on others. Uh, constitutively, you know, existentially.

Mirko Prokop: Maybe the flip side of this as well, that I, I think also came up in this conversation that I, I mentioned earlier, [00:57:00] which I think they call, um, this idea of complexity, fatigue. That may be sometimes you're too open to everything at the same time. Yeah, 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

Mirko Prokop: I mean, very overwhelming and I, I mean, I know this from my own experience as someone who I think needs a lot of time to like digest 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: Yeah. 

Mirko Prokop: Patients digest different viewpoints. But I'm also always open and wanting to engage. Yeah. Finding this right balance, is really difficult

Ezequiel Di Paolo: it is obviously difficult and, and, and I, um, and there's no recipe for it.

That's, that's the difficulty as well in the sense that, yeah, you can get some advice about like, oh, let, let, listen to what the others has to say. Do not interrupt. Fine, that's fine. But, but these things never do away with the possibility of full breakdown, misunderstanding that that can happen at any time.

And not because anybody wants it. Uh, often [00:58:00] it happens when everybody's trying to avoid it. That's also one of the reasons why, why it happens. It's paradoxical. Um, now, uh, so what, what does love have to do with it? What's, what's love got to do with it? Okay. Uh. I think, okay, there are many, many different connections, but one is that this, this openness that, that, uh, would, would direct you to what is like good ways to know others and to know anything really is it has the same structure as, as the one we find when we love, uh, somebody or sometimes more generally, could love a place you could love, but in love.

You, you, you do have that, , basic existential structure of, uh, dependence, openness, but also tension, , and constant becoming, constant negotiation and constant change. [00:59:00] And there must be something that pulls this process forward because. Sometimes it's just too much work. Mm-hmm. And what is it? I mean, well, I think it has to do with the fact that you're intuit that in this complex relations, you are also changing yourself to the kind of person you want to be.

When it goes like in that direction, sometimes it, it may not be like that, but sometimes you, you see that as a possibility, as a potentiality, , that then you, you become therefore the person that you desire to be, uh, through this, this, this complex forms of relations. So that, if you like, that can be extended to all forms of engagement with the world, engagement with nature, engagement with communities, and so on and so forth.

And that does not mean, please, this should be obvious that everything is rosy and great, you know, because suddenly we are kind of open [01:00:00] and ready to love everyone. No, no. It, it's on the contrary. It's what some of the more difficult forms of interaction, um, and it sometimes it just doesn't work.

That's the thing. I mean, the good knowledge, like, like, like that, that what Shay was saying. Also, the effort you put into understanding somebody, just sometimes it does not work. Uh, and it breaks down and that's it that you, you, you tried, uh, maybe things need to change in order for that to happen again. Maybe try again later.

Mirko Prokop: I was wondering how you think, um, how this connects to another theme that I'm very interested in, that I also came up in my conversation with Michael Wheeler, which is the of authenticity and, and also being sort of yourself.

Yeah. Very big term

Ezequiel Di Paolo: Absolutely uh, well, again, it's a really good question and I wouldn't have [01:01:00] a, like a absolute clear answer. I mean, I have a, a certain directions because these ideas of becoming, that we were talking about already kind of suggests to you that authenticity is not quite rightly conceived as, as a way of being true to something static.

You know, because there is nothing, nothing static. I mean, so, so I I'm constantly changing. Does it mean I'm inauthentic?. No, I mean, obviously there's a tension. . When you may be authentic is in, in that process of becoming your, your, in a way involved in it, you just simply not being pulled and pushed, uh, without you ever, , bringing yourself in, in, into it critically reflectively and say, maybe this is not quite right.

These things are manifested emotionally before they're manifested [01:02:00] consciously, as, as, as, as ways of thinking. But, uh, emotionally, you know that you're not living through a right situation. Something doesn't fit what is authentic is not necessarily also the self, although that's how the language works, unfortunately.

But what is authentic is the, the form of life in in, in your situation, not just you. So it has to be. Authenticity also has to be considered relational. 

Mirko Prokop: In relational 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: terms. And when you look at, at authenticity also it, it's historical because in, in, in, in past societies, authenticity was not such an issue because you, you had your place in the world, you know, medieval times or ancient societies.

And to be authentic would be, to be, to play that role. You were a farmer. You, you were something else, you were a soldier, and you just did that. The role defined you, uh, is just that it's become an issue, you know, with enlightenment and maybe [01:03:00] even earlier in the sense that the individual was put at the, at, at the center of the inquiry.

And then we became very conscious as, as of ourselves, as individuals. Um, , what is interesting is that unlike, for instance, I think it was Oscar Wild who said that. I can't remember the exact quote, but it's something like, uh, to be true to yourself, you should, uh, constantly engage in new artificial changes all the time.

You know, that is the way to be true. You don't need to conserve anything you need to keep on changing. Um, I wish I had a exact quote. Uh, so that is, um, that is interesting because it also speaks of, uh, uh, an openness of, if you like, the human essence. Paradoxically being something that is not fixed.

Uh, there's a becoming and, and, and in the article about enactive becoming, I [01:04:00] talk about several philosophers who have been looking at becoming, you know, from renaissance, philosophers like Pico della Mirandola, uh, mid 20th century, uh, psychologist like Gordon Allport. Uh people like Paolo Freire you know, his critical pedagogy and Marxist philosophy and so on.

And so each of them is telling you something about becoming that is right, but it's just them is telling, pointing to what's missing in the, in the other one, uh, and eventually you come to, to, to a conception of, of becoming that I think is quite rich and based on ideas of Simondon and things like that.

Mirko Prokop: How do you, how do you think about this, um, in,, in an academic context or maybe in a reflective context where you have to engage with other people's ideas, uh, critically, but also stay true to your own ideas?

It's sometimes very difficult because of course there's so much information, there's so [01:05:00] much to read. Yeah. And you find yourself sort of repeating what other people have said and not really sure. Is that what I think? Or is that what, what they, so, and, and I, yeah. One thing I find inspiring about your work is that whether or not someone agrees with it, you know, you, you develop your own kind of positions also often against the mainstream positions, um, exposing yourself to this kind of criti criticism.

Um, and that's not an easy thing to do, and you have to, I think, have also trust in your own thinking, but there's always, of course, also the possibility that you're wrong and that you're, yeah. And so I was wondering how do you, how do you deal with this? Do you have some kind of advice for, for people.

Ezequiel Di Paolo: I think it's, it's, it's, it's a great, uh, question and I, and I think you have to navigate it in each, each circumstance. Circumstances will be different. That it's not like a general thing, but one thing that I think might be [01:06:00] general and helpful is to, to stay true to the, to your questions, to stay true to 

Maybe your question keeps changing shape because the formulations, the things you learn help you formulate it in a different way and so on. But it's something that is, is driving your interests and your questions and so on, and, and, and that you end up knowing these questions so intimately. You know, you wanna know really what this means, that there is no.

Oh, let's put it this way. The, the, there is little chance that you will be overwhelmed to the point that you, that you abandon them. Uh, they can shape, change their shape, but if your question is, is, is sincere, authentic, uh, you, you, you will not be [01:07:00] overwhelmed so much by the information you, you may then, if you do it more consciously, you may then understand better whether the information is really that useful for you or not.

You say, well, this seems to be about the same issue that I'm interested in, but after reading two lines, I realized that they mean something else. Do I need to really learn all of this? Maybe not right now. Maybe, maybe, uh, you, you seek, ev everything, the things that connect most directly to your question.

Mirko Prokop: Mm-hmm. Uh

Ezequiel Di Paolo: and, and speak to you.

You postpone everything else. You know, of course. The problem is that there are other requirements in an academic life. Like you have to be scholarly, you have to know lots of stuff and, and write lots of papers. Fine. That is difficult. Mm-hmm but if you work at least want to make sure that, that you are true to your path, to what you [01:08:00] want to do, um, keep asking your central question or questions and then say, here is something that connects to it.

Often it's very clear, it is not intellectual, it's emotional. Often it's very clear. You, you just read some old philosopher that you've never heard of and you suddenly come across a paragraph and say, wow, yes, that's exactly the right way to put it. Who is this guy? Uh. And, and those things are emotional.

You just feel them like this aha moment, this, this, this thing that, that hits you. Um, other times the opposite is happening. You're dragging on. You're dragging on. It's like, why am I even reading this? Okay, well perhaps it's not the right time. . Somebody told you it's relevant and maybe even if they are right

If it's such a difficult thing, [01:09:00] perhaps you should keep your questions alive because the real problem is that the whole machinery often will just simply kill your inquiry will, will kill the, the spirit of with which you started. And that is a very common problem.

Mm-hmm. 

If, if you keep to, to the track that you see as, as the one that is interesting to you and or important to you, um, you, you would be likely to be doing the right thing. Um of course.

That doesn't mean your questions cannot change, it doesn't mean that you cannot learn new things and new, new ideas. That's fine. But it's the same thing. You're enacting, you're bringing forth your academic world, so to speak, and therefore you have to, to do it right. Uh, not just you, you know, maybe with a community of people, you have to do it, uh, right.

By being truthful to what's [01:10:00] really important to, to all of you. So, uh, I, I know that that's not very practical advice. 

Mirko Prokop: Oh, it's super helpful, I think. And important also to remember. Um, I was just wondering, are there questions for you that you would say maybe they've somehow been left behind a little bit that.

That are driving you in the background, but you are, you would like to spend more time thinking about in the future, or are thinking about at the moment? 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: Oh, oh, I'm sure there are. Uh, there are many. Yeah. Uh, undoubtedly, I, I think maybe too many, uh, we didn't mention the word dualism in this conversation, but enactive approach, it should be clear.

It rejects, dualistic ways of thinking. Like, oh, you have this on the one hand, and it's very different from that. You have rationality in institutions on one side and biology drives [01:11:00] perception on the other, eh, . There may be differences, but there are not big walls. Uh, that that's the thing that, so everything interacts.

So, but I'm interested in like, well, okay, what kind of ontology is the right ontology for serving as the basis for this way of thinking. I mean, of course it's kind of gonna be a kind of process, relational ontology and so on. But then how does it extend to other questions such as that, that these ontological, uh, ideas will connect to, you know, um, problems such as, you know, environmental emergencies or, or politics or science.

You know, what, what the problems in science and quantum mechanics, what's going on? And so, so I'm, I see all these connections that I find interesting and I've done some work on or have conversations about. 

Mirko Prokop: Mm-hmm 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: all coming from these very basic [01:12:00] questions like, what kind of universe is this? That we are able to continuously do this creative stuff, uh, that, uh, that seems to be unfinished and that.

When we do stuff, it's changing. Uh, so interesting. Uh, I, I like to understand that better. 

Mirko Prokop: Wow. Okay. Yeah. That's, that's a big, big task. But I guess you still have, well, yeah. 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: You, you asked for a question that 

use for retirement. It is a big one. 

Yes. Yeah. 

Mirko Prokop: Um, I think we probably have to come to an end soon. Okay. 'cause my attention span is, is, uh, running out. But is there anything that we didn't mention that you would've loved to 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: talk about? No. No no I think we covered a lot. Happy. 

Mirko Prokop: Well, thank you so much. 

Ezequiel Di Paolo: Okay. Thank you. Right