Autopoiesis, Heidegger, Futurity

Hello everyone and welcome back to Active Inference Insights. I'm your host, Darius Parvizzi-Wayne, and today I'm talking with Marilyn Sendera. Marilyn is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Her research focuses mainly on the phenomenological tradition, particularly its intersections with cognitive science, and she has a particular interest in the role of time and how it shapes our cognition and experience. In 2015, she wrote the paper Being in the World, Temporality and Autopoiesis, which explored the inextricable intertwining of age in the world, the confluence of Heideggerian perspectives and inactivism and self-organization. And to my eyes, at least her focus on these domains makes her work amenable, at least in principle, to the insights of Active Inference. And among other things, it is the viability of that project, that sort of coming together, that we will be investigating today. Marilyn, thank you so much for joining me and welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Darius. I'm really pleased to be here. Yeah, it's an absolute pleasure. I mean, I sort of came across you by finding that 2015 paper, and I love it. I went back and read it again, sort of in preparation for our podcast today. And it's it's so insightful. And yeah, I just as a sign point for anyone listening, I highly recommend they go check that out. But let's dive into some of the things that you spoke about in that paper. There's a quote that you took that you referenced from Varela, Francisco Varela, who sort of introduced the term autopoiesis with Maturana into the biological literature in 1980. And he wrote, a universe comes into being when a space is severed in two. I wondered if you could help us unpick what he meant by that. Yeah, so that's a that's so firstly, thank you so much for your for your kind words about my paper. I think everybody loves loves hearing that. So yeah, so Varela in general has been a huge influence on how I look at cognition. I think since I wrote that paper, I've kind of come to a more nuanced, I guess, understanding of what autopoiesis and autonomy and activism are about. But yeah, this this this idea of of the cognitive process as being fundamentally relational and precarious and something that can't be understood by looking at at any of the one components involved in that process in isolation. Right. It's that fundamental idea of of innocence. Cognition is is always this precarious process intention. It's the creation of a boundary. It's the creation of a separation, a barrier, but also always at the same time, a barrier that has to be porous and a barrier that is always something that is under threat that has to be maintained. And there's there's always that question, which is something that's fascinated me of the the the kind of the tension between just how much that barrier has to be maintained versus how much it has to be open to change, which is, I think, also one of the the really interesting points of conversation with with interest. But yeah, this this idea of of cognition, world and action, there is there is a boundary, there's a separation, there is this this sense of what in subsequent kind of inactive literatures is called both self production and self distinction, especially. Right. So that something brings itself into being something maintains itself, something distinguishes itself. And thereby we get this kind of whole complicated, wonderful condition of having world. Right. Fantastic. Yeah. It's interesting that you mentioned that there's a kind of philosophical question there about the point to which, you know, where does where does that self distinction start and end? Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the active inference literature is converging on a point of vagueness, sort of a sorized paradox perspective that, you know, when does a grain of sand become a pile or a heap and so on? I guess another philosophical question is, does it you just to start with the…