Inspirations
In nature nothing exists alone. —Rachel Carson
To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds. — bell hooks
It takes two to know one. —Gregory Bateson
Instead of meaning a dualism of mind and body, or mind and world, [experience] denotes the interaction of the live creature and environment, an interaction that is a matter of direct, immediate, and full-bodied presence. — John Dewey, From Art as Experience
All doing is knowing and all knowing is doing. —Maturana & Varela
“Ambiguity is not a lack of univocity. Ambiguity is 'good'...In truth, we have experience of knowledge and knowledge of experience. These two faces of ambiguity are abstractions. The absolute is that which is between the two: the transformation of one into the other. —Maurice Melearu-Ponty (Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel)
Way-making is a term inspired by Taoism, and can be understood as the movement of the body as well as the movement of the mind: “Way-making blunts the sharp edges and untangles the knots; it softens the glare and brings things together on the same track.” —Ames and Hall, 2003 translation of ‘Dao’, first found in Bouton, 2024.
In addition to the pragmatist and phenomenological traditions, the Daoist tradition and the wide literature relative to studies in ‘complexity’, some other references for the history from which my own ideas have developed are the following:
Inspirations for navigational approach are most specific below, but include every hippocampus researcher and everyone in the McGill university tradition of neuroscience, especially Brenda Milner. The list also includes all the people in the list below and all those I’ve had discussions with here, especially those working towards an understanding of mind that is movement-oriented, bodily and ecological and the Heidelberg school following from Karl Jaspers and my own supervisor there Thomas Fuchs.
For more of the many references relative to paradox specifically, please see the bibliography and sources in the book Embracing Paradox: How to Keep Going When You Can’t and Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness
Rachel Carson, Francisco Varela, Herbert Mead, W.E.B. Du Bois, William James, Lynn Margulis, John Dewey, Walter Benjamin, Hilary Putnam, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Hannah Arendt, Rodney Brooks, Tim Ingold, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wilhelm Leibniz, E.F. Schumacher, the Todd family, William Irwin Thompson and family (and many associated with the Lindisfarne community), Ingeborg Bachmann, Edmund Husserl, Kurt Gödel, Edward Tolman, Donna Haraway (‘making-with’), Richard Rorty, G.W.F. Hegel, Simone Weil, Gilbert Ryle, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Francisco Varela, Edward Tolman, Evan Thompson, Elias Cannetti, J.J. Gibson, Harry Heft, Tony Chemero, William Blake, William Butler Yeats, Michael Levin and Richard Watson, Eleanor McGuire, Karl Friston, Andy Clark, Hanne De Jaegher, Ezequiel Di Paolo, Gregory Bateson, Thích Nhất Hạnh, John O’Keefe, Lynn Nadel, Walt Whitman, Jerry Fodor, Amiri Baraka, Spinoza, Janet Levin, Patricia Churchland, and a very long list of both French and German philosophers, phenomenologists and poets. As well as ongoing collaborations with the ZoNE and BEYOND NETWORKS by Yogi Jaeger. Also of course many talks with colleagues, including everyone you see featured on L&P. Also check out the work of Mark James in Tom Froese’s group at OIST and the way-shaping ideas Mark and Mushfiqua Jamaluddin are creating together.
More specifics for the navigational approach from philosophers and scientists in books and papers:
Phenomenology of Perception by M. Merleau-Ponty
The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map by O’Keefe and Nadal
The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram
Unthought by N. Katherine Hayles
Phenomenology of Spirt by G.W.F. Hegel
The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems by J.J. Gibson
Perspectival Realism by Michela Massimi
Making by Tim Ingold
Ecology of the Brain by Thomas Fuchs
Woman and Nature by Susan Griffin
The Tangled Tree by David Quammen
The Life of Lines by Tim Ingold
The Phenomenon of Life by Hans Jonas
Action in Perception and Strange Tools by Alva Noë
Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men by Edward Tolman
Mind in Life by Evan Thompson
I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter
Ideas by Edmund Husserl
The Concept of Mind by Gilbert Ryle.
There is more than one kind of learning by Edward Tolman
Le visible et l’invisible by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The Embodied Mind Cognitive Science and Human Experience by Francisco J. Varela, Eleanor Rosch and Evan Thompson
The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology by Husserl
Gentle Bridges by Hayward & Varela
The Big Sea by Langston Hughes
On Love by bel hooks
Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition by Hanne De Jaegher & Ezequiel Di Paolo (and basically all the papers and work by Di Paolo and De Jaegher)
Radical Embodied Cognitive Science by Anthony P. Chemero
The Old Ways by Robert McFarlane
The Music of Life by Denis Noble
The Embodied Mind by Rosch, Thompson, Varela
Voice of the Poet by Wallace Stevens
The Grey Album by Kevin Young
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt
Familiar Stranger by Stuart Hall
I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter
Illuminations by Walter Benjamin
From Bacteria to Bach and Back by Daniel Dennett
Reality is Not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli
Kurze Einführung in die Neue Phänomenologie by Hermann Schmitz
On Trails by Robert Moor
Enaction by Stewart, Gapenne, and Di Paolo (Eds.)
Ethics by Benedict Spinoza
Conceptual Spaces by Peter Gärdenfors
The Triple Helix by Richard Lewontin
Wholeness and the Implicate Order by David Bohm
Ecological Identity by Mitchell Thomashow
Loving and Knowing by Hanne De Jaegher
These videos by Fred Cummins are also important.
The work of Richard Watson and Bernardo Kastrup and our conversations: The Daimon and the Soul of the West: Finding identity, meaning, and purpose in a sacrificial life.
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andrea hiott
The navigational approach comes from all of the above but also from the study of cognition and navigation more generally. it reframes cognition as a dynamic process of movement through various spatiotemporal landscapes. This framework considers cognition not as a separate mental function but as the trajectories of an agent’s movement through its ongoing encounter with the world, encompassing mental, physical, and virtual realms. Way-making emphasizes that cognition is not confined to human experience but is a process shared across species, rooted in the embodied, navigational abilities of living beings. Way-making is all this ongoingness and is ultimately (or absolutely) unmeasurable, but we can measure navigabilities in a rigorous and specific way. The PhD thesis on this approach goes into that in detail.
In addition to many philosophical sources, this approach is inspired by recent research on the hippocampal formation and entorhinal cortex, which show that knowledge acquisition, memory, and spatial navigation are part of a continuous, nonlinear process governed by statistical regularities in sensory landscapes.
Waymaking is not merely about finding paths but about actively making them, acknowledging the uniqueness of each embodied being’s trajectory through time and space. It is a process that is allowed to be mysterious beyond binary thinking. By "holding the paradox" of this movement being both unmeasureable and measureable so as to be better understood, science and philosophy actually becomes more specific and individual without relying so heavily on means and assumptions of any absolute metric. This framework is a way to explore how intelligence manifests in diverse forms, from human cognition to plant and animal behaviors, arguing that what humans label as cognition is merely the "growing tip" of a much older, life-wide process of navigability.
The hope is for practical applications of this philosophy across disciplines, including urban planning, neuroscience, and technology, and efforts are already being made in those directions.