Ezequiel Di Paolo: Varela International Symposium 2022: Laying Down a Path in Walking (Mind in Life): Enaction and the Dialectics of Nature (1 of 8)

Series Description: Over the past three decades, a transformative view of life, now known as “the enactive view,” has been developed and expanded by thinkers in philosophy and the sciences of mind; prominent among them was the late Chilean neuroscientist, philosopher, and Buddhist practitioner, Francisco Varela, for whom this symposium is named. The Varela International Symposium, 2022, with its extraordinary international faculty of scientists, philosophers, and contemplatives, explored the enactive view that living beings are fundamentally sense-making creatures that bring forth meaning in their interactions with their physical and social environments. As such, a subject enacts the world he or she is part of, including the physical environment, and this world reflects social, ethical and political values and structures. Recent contributions within the enactive framework by faculty in this year’s Varela Symposium have expanded how we understand social cognition, social interaction, and cultural institutions, including science, medicine, politics, and our relationship to the natural world. The 2022 Varela International Symposium explored the potential outcomes and psychosocial impacts of shifting our extractive, reductionistic, mechanistic, predictive views to an enactive view that could be profoundly transformational at a personal as well as global level. Presentations and panel discussions occurred along with contemplative practice during this unique program which was organized and sponsored by Upaya Zen Center and Institute, Santa Fe, NM and Mind and Life Europe. Episode Description: What does it mean that we “lay down a path in walking”? It means that you and I co-create our worlds by the ways we live. We walk the trails created by others while simultaneously creating our own, or as Ezequiel Di Paolo puts it: “There is no way in which we cannot change the world.” Our ground is shared with other path-makers. The question is: how can we help make the ground fertile for other paths? Professor Ezequiel Di Paolo, in this opening talk of Upaya’s Varela Symposium 2022, introduces the Enactive approach to mind and life. Enaction understands mind and life (or mind and world) as continuous or inseparable. It offers an alternative to the metaphor of the mind as the brain, and the brain as a computer. It also rejects a reductive individualism and insists that there is a social dimension to all aspects of life. “We are always already embodied, biological, sensorimotor, and social beings engaged in the adventure of making ourselves and our world together with others and together with our material environment.” Some of the questions Ezequiel explores in this talk are: What do we mean by “life?” What is agency? How do we relate to our world? Can we reject the dualisms of body/mind, subject/object, self/other, humanity/nature, etc., without erasing all differences? And can we understand why dualisms are so pervasive rather than just ignoring them? Professor Di Paolo also discusses the place of Enaction in evolution, and its view that the organism is both the subject and object of evolution, rather than a merely passive participant. Finally, he explains why he finds the popular notion of nature as “harmonious” to be ideologically conservative. Enaction is “against harmony and for participation,” Ezequiel says. There is a “primordial tension” in life. And if we erase contradictions, we erase ourselves. The goal, Di Paolo claims, is to work through and with contradictions rather than to dissolve them, or put another way: “Let us find better contradictions, in lieu of abstract harmony.” To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: