Hello. My name is Andrea and my work lives at the intersection of philosophy, environmental studies, neuroscience, and technology. This work focuses on the ways we make and seeks a sustainable, ecological orientation to motoring and movement. For more on this, you can see the Love & Philosophy series, Beyond Dichotomy, in podcast and video, the Desirable Unknown, and the Ecological Motoring Initiative.
Whether consulting transportation companies, rethinking experiential patterns for livable cities, speaking about mind as embodied movement and navigability, or engaging in philosophical research and writing, the goal is towards a coherent and practical understanding of mind & ecological responsibility that lifts our spirits.
In my academic life, with degrees in neuroscience, philosophy, heritage & technology studies, I've been working to highlight a framework for embodied cognition and its phenomenology that can be used across scales and species. This is possible due to a pattern that I and others have noticed that appears in all studies of intelligence, namely, that what is being assessed is always some sort of movement through some sort of landscape or phase space, be that traditional spaces like parks and cities or more mental and social spaces such as through a book, an exam, a relationship, or a song. In all these spaces, an embodied being is making its way, adding its unique contribution and affordance to the ways it finds and inherits: this is way-making.
Way-finding is part of it, but through our very living, each embodied individual makes a path that is unique to its spatiotemporal process through time and space. No one body is ever in the same position in time or space, and the path we make from birth through death is never broken and never replicated. Assuming the power and responsibility of path-building means accepting the ways we are making rather than only the ones we are finding. Way-making thus becomes crucial to our ecological, phenomenological orientation.
The hope of framing intelligences as navigabilities is to find a way to model and map trajectories so that we can get a better overall view of the many diverse ways there are of being and experiencing.
The goal is not only to make tools that will help us better symbolize and represent (so as to share) these diverse paths for one another, but also to further open and shift towards an ecological orientation, acknowledging that what humans experience as cognitions are the growing tips of processes that started long before humans, processes that continue in embodied ways that are not only human.
‘Intelligences’ (thinking, mind, cognition, whatever word one prefers) is a human representation, a human word, for something life has been doing for as long as life has been—what I imagine as navigability. We can begin to understand cognitions as abilities of conscious beings towards developing, exploring, and caring for that consciousness. In so doing, we find depth and meaning in our own thoughts, feelings, experiences, and ecological entanglement.
The ways we make
Over the past fifteen years, in ways both orthodox and unorthodox (see below) I have been working towards answering a few very simple but challenging questions—namely, what is mind? And why do we have one?
The answers I’ve found to these questions form a philosophy I am developing (with the help of many others, from many disciplines) which approaches the study of cognition through the heuristics of navigability.
What humans call cognitions are the growing tips of processes that started long before humans, processes that continue in embodied ways that are not only human. ‘Cognition’ (thinking, mind, intelligence, whatever word one prefers) is a human representation, a human word, for something life has been doing for as long as life has been--for finding ways, for developing navigability. Life does this in whatever place it finds itself, and this includes the mental, social, and emotional places of human experience. Is human cognition special? It is certainly a new scale of nestedness and responsibility.
Way-making is a term for all forms of navigability and is part of an ecological orientation that combines the disciplines of philosophy and neuroscience to help us better understand our thoughts, feelings, and memories while also understanding life and its navigability at various nested knowledges (plant, animal, insect, etc). It is a philosophy built by the ways we move through the world and the ways we are moved by it. Both scientifically and philosophically, it offers a framework to address the questions: What are thoughts, feelings and memories? And why do we have them?
The short answer is—we have them to help us make our way in the world. Surprisingly, however, the world also has us for the same reason. Once we explore this through the phenomenology of mental and environmental health, we begin to see the world and our place in it a bit differently—not as linear and binary, but as nested and ecological. We also begin to understand where we may have gotten off track, why our inner lives can feel so potent, and how we can shift into a better place.
On how this relates to motoring: To motor is to move with a consistent source of energy. In that sense, we have always been motoring, whether with bodies or with vehicles. Ecological motoring would mean meeting the motoring needs of all within the means of the planet (to reference a phrase coined by Kate Raworth). Is it possible? Let’s hope so. Solving this puzzle feels paramount. And deeply tied to how motoring structures the ways we think and feel.
Rethinking technology and ecology.
On a metaphorical level, we have long understood life is a journey, but research relative to navigation and orientation across the biological and cognitive sciences is currently coming together to help us address urgent issues of mental and environmental health. A large part of this change requires a reorientation in our understanding of technology and its relation to mind.
Even more crucial, however, is a reorientation in how we understand the human position and what it means to be part of an ecology rather than ‘in’ it. In other words, it requires shifting through an individualistic perspective towards discovering an ecological one.
This is a primary concern of my work and research. Together with my colleagues, I hope to offer and illuminate an ecological orientation, a shift in our stance to self and landscape that helps us better understand what mind is, how it develops, and what this means for the paths we choose as individuals and as a living planet. My writings and work are focused on this emerging reorientation at the intersection of science and the humanities. I am also developing technology towards deepening our everyday awareness of this connection in ways that will ease our minds and reconnect our sensualities.
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Ramblings while trying to accept my trajectory.
Once while discussing the success of my book Thinking Small, a fellow philosopher slipped out the following— Oh Andrea, I’m so surprised it went like that.
I understood the sentiment. I imagined other friends in our little group were feeling it when they looked at me. I’d set out to write a philosophical text about ecological dialectics and ended up writing a book about history and cars (the long, strange trip of the Volkswagen Beetle). It was hard to see how it all fit, but I had no regrets.
I’d fallen in love with the Bug and its story, unabashedly. Writing that book, and working with the people I collaborated with on it, was a true gift. It was also a path I had not expected to take. After co-creating and sustaining an interdisciplinary journal, I had visions of Camus, de Beauvoir and Arendt. Now I’d been named a cultural historian and automotive journalist— wonderful titles, but ones that caught me off guard.
All those days scribbling out stories while working in independent bookshops in Seattle and NYC; all those nights drinking wine in European cafes while writing, studying, and discussing philosophy—it was hard to see how writing about transportation fit to my life. My friend’s “surprise” was a way of acknowledging my discomfort. Even before the book was published, I’d packed up for Mongolia and signed on to work for the Peace Corps, restless to push further at expectations and find another way of seeing the world.
After the Peace Corps and some years wandering, completing a project for the U.S. Embassy, working for artists and collectors, and continuing as an editor, writer and translator—the connections between all these divergent desires slowly began to become clear. Through all my exploration, a few themes and questions kept recurring:
How do we find our way? And how does our way find us?
In my early university years, I’d written a thesis (Hegel, Rorty, Bohm) towards a dynamical definition of mind. In it, I’d explored mind as an active process. I began to imagine cognition as though it were another form of navigation, a way we move and are moved by the world.
The intimacy of our thoughts and memories can often make it feel as if we are shut off from the relationships and ecologies that sustain and create us. I began to wonder—Is there a way to shift perspective and sense that same mind as ecological? Are there sensory motifs and thought patterns threading through our ecology and linking us with all we encounter? If so, how might our awareness of those paths & patterns lead to healthier communal action & agency?
With those questions in mind, I settled in Berlin to supplement my philosophy degree with a degree in neuroscience. I started studying and working in labs that focused on navigation, computation and cognition, and I continued developing a philosophy around ecological orientation and waymaking, exploring how our sensory relations come together in a common atmosphere.
Exploring the continuity of memory, thinking and action, my forthcoming work is connected by the desire to understand the dynamic spatiotemporal connections between ecology and mind, and to do so beyond traditional dichotomies. Looking back now, I can see that my first book was moving towards something similar—the history of transportation is about new ways of experiencing space and time, both socially and technologically.
The New York Times recently asked the legendary comedian and creator Jerry Seinfeld to name his literary guilty pleasure, and he named my book Thinking Small. This was a great gift, for more reasons than one, as he starts by saying: “I don’t feel guilt to begin with.” The way he turns the question on its head parallels the movement of my own evolution these days as I’ve accepted the strange path of my life, and no longer much care if what I do satisfies niche-based proprieties. This path may not fit expectations of normalcy, but what path does?
My former discomfort about being part of so many seemingly contradictory worlds no longer makes much sense. Rather I understand that the more perspective we can handle, the more the contradictions become compliments. The strange topography of my life is authentic, evidence of my hunger to explore space, to cover as much emotional and mental terrain as possible, to widen into other points of view and experiment with ways of expanding “I” through the “we” of ecology; asking what it means to be here, and how we come to know that we are.