BI 248 Andrea Hiott: The Navigational Approach to the Mind

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Andrea Hiott is a philosopher at Universität Heidelberg, but she has various degrees across philosophy and neuroscience. You may know her from her podcast Love and Philosophy, or her Way-making substack, or her writings elsewhere. Through all her work runs a central theme, that we need to go beyond dichotomous thinking and learn to hold paradoxes as they are. Holding Paradox is the title of her new book. The full title is Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind, and that subtitle, the navigational approach, is the term Andrea uses for her version of what should replace the current computational metaphor of the mind. In the book, Andrea uses the rich history of research in a particular brain area, the hippocampus, to illustrate what holding paradox is and what the navigational approach is. The hippocampus is a good example to use, because it has two parallel histories- one as the seat of our memory, and another as a cognitive map, how we move through the world and how we move through our thoughts.

Andrea's website.

Book:

Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind

Podcast:

Love and Philosophy

Substack:

Way-making

Radical Embodied Relation at any Scale, from Remembering to Navigating.

0:00 - Intro 3:01 - Creating vs criticizing 5:25 - Holding paradox 9:04 - Neuroscience and philosophy 11:42 - Hippocampus and movement 18:05 - Computational metaphor 30:52 - Ways of doing science 43:25 - Why is now the time? 51:34 - Navigational mind and AI 1:09:27 - Perspectivalism vs holding paradox 1:21:31 - Consciousness 1:25:38 - How to be alive 1:29:26 - Holding paradox community?