Where does the mind end, and how much of who we are is made through our relationships with the world around us?

Cognitive archaeologist Lambros Malafouris joins philosopher Shaun Gallagher to explore a view of the mind that reaches beyond the brain. Drawing on Malafouris's Material Engagement Theory and Gallagher's work on embodied and enactive cognition, they examine how thinking emerges through the ongoing relationship between brain, body, other people, objects, technologies, and the environments we inhabit.

Their conversation explores the four E's of cognition—embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive—why objects and materials may participate in human agency, the relationship between pottery and the potter who shapes it, how our brains and environments change together, and how technologies become part of the processes that make us who we are. From there, they turn to AI and ask what happens when technologies change faster than we can understand their effects on us: how digital systems reshape habits and institutions, what skills may disappear along the way, and whether changing our everyday practices may matter as much as changing the rules that govern technology.

Three core questions:

1. Does cognition happen inside the brain, or emerge through relationships between brain, body, other people, and the material world?

2. If tools and technologies help shape our agency, habits, and sense of self, what happens when those technologies change?

3. As AI becomes embedded in everyday life and institutions, how do we preserve the embodied practices and ways of thinking we still value?

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GUESTS

Lambros Malafouris - Cognitive & Anthropological Archaeologist
Professor of Cognitive & Anthropological Archaeology, University of Oxford
Tutorial Fellow in Archaeology and Anthropology, Hertford College
Developer of Material Engagement Theory and author of People Are STRANGE: Material Engagement and the Creation of Self-Consciousness
https://www.hertford.ox.ac.uk/staff/lambros-malafouris/
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262553902/people-are-strange/

Shaun Gallagher - Philosopher & Cognitive Scientist
Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy, University of Memphis
Known for his work on embodied cognition, phenomenology, agency, intersubjectivity, and the Pattern Theory of Self
https://www.memphis.edu/philosophy/people/
https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/facpubs/6153/

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Chapters

00:00 Meet Lambros Malafouris and Shaun Gallagher
02:38 The four E's: embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive cognition
09:05 Material Engagement Theory: how things shape the mind
16:34 What scientific models leave out
19:14 The situated person and the relational mind
23:35 Where does agency actually live?
28:44 Agency, body ownership, and the minimal self
30:25 The potter, the clay, and agency in the relationship
35:23 STRANGE, metaplasticity, and how humans become
44:03 What London taxi drivers reveal about brains and technology
46:05 Three kinds of technological transparency
49:34 What are our technologies doing to us?
50:55 AI, human becoming, and the technologies we choose
56:00 The socially extended mind and how institutions shape us
59:26 When digital technologies become the structure of institutions
1:03:04 Habits, practices, and another way to think about change
1:09:50 What embodied skills could we lose in the age of AI?
1:12:19 From pottery to politics: where the conversation leads

What is life, and how much say do we have in shaping what comes next?

Astrobiologist and theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker joins artist and futurist Amy Karle to explore the questions they each reach from opposite directions: what life is, how it begins, and how we would recognize it somewhere else. Drawing on Walker's search for the physics and possible laws of life and Karle's art made with the tools of frontier science and biotechnology, they find where a scientist's attempt to see life differently meets an artist's attempt to help us feel possibilities we do not yet have language for.

Their conversation explores time and how differently each of us lives it, possibility versus probability, creativity as a force that shapes the world, the traces we leave for the future, bioprinting and what we become when we remake the body, how a work changes as different cultures receive it, and the question of what part we play in the universe's ongoing creativity.

Three core questions:

1. What does it mean to be alive, and how would we recognize life radically unlike our own?

2. Can genuinely new possibilities emerge, or is the future fundamentally constrained by the past and by probability?

3. Is the universe itself creative, and what role do life, intelligence, and human agency play in that creative process?

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GUESTS

Sara Imari Walker - Astrobiologist & Theoretical Physicist

Professor and Deputy Director, Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Arizona State University

Author of Life as No One Knows It and co-developer of Assembly Theory

https://search.asu.edu/profile/1731899

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/bo...

Amy Karle - Artist, Bioartist & Futurist

Known for Regenerative Reliquary and The Heart of Evolution

Exhibited at Ars Electronica, the Centre Pompidou, and the Mori Art Museum

https://www.amykarle.com

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Chapters

00:00 Meet Sara Imari Walker and Amy Karle

01:14 What does it mean to be alive?

04:41 The futures cone, and how much we shape what comes

07:33 Possibility, probability, and the outliers that surprise us

10:40 Living out of the past, or starting from a blank slate

16:28 Echoes from the Valley of Existence: leaving DNA on the Moon

23:04 Our very different relationships to time

42:07 Powers of Ten, and seeing clearly in the AI age

47:48 What would alien life be, and how would we know it?

58:06 Amy's beginning, and the fragility of life

1:04:37 The Heart of Evolution, and who we become when we remake the body

1:08:40 Scary and beautiful: how cultures complete the work

1:18:15 Perception, and our role in the universe's creativity

What can Freud still teach us about the brain, consciousness, and mental health?Neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms joins theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston to explore the connections between Freud’s ideas and modern neuroscience. Using Solms’s book The Only Cure as a starting point, they discuss how our experiences shape the brain’s understanding of the world—and why changing that understanding may be central to mental healing.Their conversation explores talking therapy, psychedelics, consciousness, memory, childhood development, the unconscious mind, curiosity, and the idea that our actions are guided by attempts to meet our needs and reduce uncertainty.———GUESTSMark Solms - Neuropsychologist, Psychoanalyst & AuthorProfessor, Neuroscience Institute, University of Cape TownAuthor of The Only Cure and The Hidden Springhttps://neuroscience.uct.ac.za/contac...https://www.simonandschuster.com/auth...Karl Friston - Theoretical Neuroscientist & PsychiatristProfessor of Imaging Neuroscience, University College LondonKnown for the Free Energy Principle and Active Inferencehttps://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/2747-karl-...https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/———Chapters00:00 Meet Mark Solms and Karl Friston02:23 How a psychoanalyst and a neuroscientist joined forces06:12 Freud, Feynman, and a physics of the mind10:23 A 29-year quest to translate Freud, and a new book18:50 Does therapy treat causes while medication treats symptoms?30:49 Where our sense of self and our feelings come from43:27 The hidden design of the mind that Freud could only imagine49:10 Many kinds of memory, and the depth of the mind1:02:20 The unconscious: how much of us runs on autopilot1:15:08 Why our earliest years shape us, even when we cannot recall them1:25:59 "All thinking is wishful thinking"1:32:14 From Freud to Feynman to Friston