Affordances, Enaction, Phenomenology

hello everyone and welcome back to the show today I am joined by Julian kin senior researcher in the department of Psychiatry at Amsterdam medical research Professor kin's work is fascinating and deeply important as he has developed phenomenologically informed answers to a number of questions in cognitive science including time perception conceptual thinking empathy Free Will Consciousness and the self in doing so he has become a leading intellectual in the world of 4E cognitive science as he puts it cognitive scientists once shared a vision of Mind as a kind of logic engine carrying out rule-based operations on symbolic representations today this view is rapidly being replaced by an alternative vision of brain body and world as dynamically interacting equal Partners sharing the load in our day-to-day problem solving Behavior Professor kin's work has also been highly impactful on my own thinking in these domains so honestly I am really really excited to speak to you today uh Professor kinee Julian thank you so much for joining me it's it's as I said it really is a privilege thanks so much for inviting me looking forward to our discussion very much as am I and I think uh you know I read I I've read some of your papers multiple times and and I adore them I think some of them are absolute gems in in the foury sort of lineage thank you and you sort of proposed this notion of eological inactive cognition um now fory cogy inactive cognition has a very rich history and it's worthwhile unpicking what some of these terms mean because I can imagine people are going to get confused because they're rather Niche terms at least they can sound uh as so so it'd be good to get maybe just some definitions off the ground perhaps we could start with autonomy versus heton heteronomy yeah uh what does it mean to be a kind of autonomous being yeah so that is an excellent starting point uh well autonomy is like a a very rich concept with a long history um but the way that it's used in the context of philosophy of cognitive science is by drawing on ideas about biological autonomy so autonomy is like a form of self-organization that a living system has when it is both self- producing so that's basic to the idea of self-organization that the the organization is something that emerges and so the structure the form that the living system has is something that's emergent but also that um that that autonomous systems are able to uh keep themselves going um so maintain their organization and and that requires them to to be self- individuating in a particular way so distinguishing themselves from their environment um so I think those are the the two key features that we need to have in view the self- distinction uh self- production or self- individuation as I call it sure I've been uh I've been sort of perusing Evan Thompson's 2007 mind in life which is just cracking but also super long so I'm working my way through it slowly and here's a bit where he says well autonomy it's it's sometimes quite tricky to say when something is explicitly autonomous rather than heteronomous I think that's the right way of saying it um do you subscribe to that notion that this is kind of a spectrum or there these can we cast these sharp dividing lines yeah so there's a there's a technical discussion about whether autop poesis is necessary and sufficient for autonomy I think maybe that's what you're thinking about so autop poesis is this idea that the organization is self-produced and and there's some questions about well is that enough on its own to to get autonomy right and and Evan argues it isn't uh so you need and so does AO dep Paulo you need this extra condition of um adaptivity as they call it Y in my work with Michael kof we uh we connect that idea of adaptivity to to active inference yes so we discussed this in in the context of an issue that's come up quite a few times on your your podcast about uh to say about Pebbles or yes swinging pendulums that seem to behave as…