Love & Philosophy
Exploring philosophical, scientific, technological & poetic spaces beyond either/or bounds. Living into the questions. Loving as knowing. Paradox as portal.
By love and philosophy we mean the people, passions, and ideas that move us, shape the trajectories of our lives, and co-create our wider landscapes.
Thank you for supporting this experiment. It really helps.
#waymaking #navigability #love #philosophy #learning #development #loveandphilosophy #andreahiott #metaphysics #paradox #systemsthinking #paradoxicalthinking #thinkingparadoxically #philosophyofmind
Love & Philosophy
#65 The Mental Sweet Spot: Play, Risk, Surprise & Active Inference with Julian Kiverstein, senior researcher at Amsterdam UMC
Julian Kiverstein is a senior professor at Amsterdam Medical. He's co-authored various papers about the importance of play as it relates to predictive processing, active learning, intimacy and embodied cognition.
Sometimes we get stuck in attractor states. Play is a form of disruption that may be able to help us get unstuck. Play seems to be far from algorithmic.
This conversation explores how playfulness is crucial for meaning and flourishing, and how building safe spaces for play (such as museums and parks) are crucial for healthy societies.
Active inference and predictive processing are discussed as tools that might help us better model and understand this ‘sweet spot’ towards finding ways to create spaces where we can explore uncertainty and risk without danger.
Drawing from his extensive work in phenomenology, embodied cognition, and predictive processing, Julian offers fresh perspectives on how play connects to mental health and wellbeing. Some key ideas from this episode:
• Play requires safety yet involves taking risks—a paradoxical relationship that enables personal growth
• Adults often lose the curious openness of childhood as we become fixated on seriousness and habitual patterns
• Love shares qualities with play as both involve transcendence beyond the self and openness to fresh experiences
• Active inference and predictive processing provide frameworks for understanding both mental illness and flourishing
• Breaking out of "attractor states" or fixed patterns requires disruption that playful activities can provide
• Creating safe spaces for play becomes essential for development, creativity, and meaning-making
00:00 The Role of Play in Well-being
01:50 Introduction to Love and Philosophy
02:45 Exploring Active Inference and Predictive Processing
05:24 The Importance of Play in Development
09:58 Julian's Journey into Mind Studies
12:11 Understanding Mental Illness through Predictive Processing
21:57 The Concept of Play and Its Cognitive Benefits
30:27 Intrinsic Motivation and the Value of Play
44:12 Play as a Disruptive Force in Mental Health
45:09 Understanding Mental Illness and Uncertainty
46:13 The Role of Play in Mental Health
47:38 Creating Safe Spaces for Emotional Regulation
49:05 Exploration vs. Exploitation in Learning
52:03 The Importance of Play in Adulthood
53:35 Art, Literature, and Emotional Engagement
56:55 The Need for Play in Academia
01:20:50 Balancing Exploration and Familiarity
01:23:37 Final Thoughts on Play and Well-being
Intimate Places: Playgrounds for self-exploration
Playfulness and the meaningful life with Mark Miller
JK and Darius Active Inference Institute
Please rate and review with love.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.
There's a way in which play can help us with that question of what is it to be well?
Speaker 1:And for things to go well, you need to break your own habits, you need to challenge those habits and step outside of your comfort zone, sometimes when you feel safe to do so. That's where you get to grow, to develop, to grow, to develop. It connects very much with the literature on active learning and play and learning, where there's this idea that what children are doing when they play is seeking out this sweet spot where things are not too difficult or too complex so that the children don't understand what's going on, but nor are they so simple that the children have nothing to learn. We kind of lose this curious openness over the course of our development that we start out with as children. That gets lost as we become adults and we get this idea that, well, we need to be serious. There's this constant falling back on habitual ways of engaging with the world at the expense of more openness, curiosity, exploration. So I can say cliche things about love, but I don't think that's very interesting for your listeners if you really believe them it is.
Speaker 2:This is how I would answer your question.
Speaker 1:Love is an experience of transcendence towards others, towards the world, towards nature. So there's a kind of self-transcendence that comes along with a feeling of love, a movement beyond yourself towards the other. You're open to awe and wonder. You're open to a fresh appreciation of what would normally be just seen as familiar and mundane and everyday.
Speaker 2:Hello everyone, welcome to Love and Philosophy. This is Andrea Hyatt. Today I'm talking to Julian Kiverstein. He is a senior researcher in the psychiatry department at Amsterdam University Medical Center. He writes a lot about phenomenology, embodied cognition, active inference, predictive processing. You might have heard of his book Extended Consciousness and Predictive Processing, a Third Wave. He co-authored that with Michael Kirchhoff. And today we are going to talk about play, which is a very important word for so many reasons Surprise, uncertainty, certainty meaning flourishing.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of things in this conversation. I did it when I was traveling and I'm a bit discombobulated. If you watch the video you'll see I'm in sort of a makeshift kitchen environment and something about being off balance. I think actually helped us go to some new places. Took a bit of time. The first part is going to make people happy who want to hear about Carl Friston and active inference and predictive processing, and the second half we go into more personal things or creative ideas. We talk about a museum called El Echo, which I should name here. It's a museum in Mexico City. We'll talk about four papers towards understanding. Play its relation to active inference, which I've name here. It's a museum in Mexico City. We'll talk about four papers towards understanding play, its relation to active inference, which I've already mentioned.
Speaker 2:This conversation with Julian I had a while ago it's been maybe half a year or more and I had talked with Carl Friston not too long before Julian and I talked. So there's a lot of references in here to Carl. You don't need to listen to that conversation, but I just want you to know. If you hear Carl, that's who we're talking about. Also, these kind of big terms, if you haven't heard them before active inference, free energy principle, predictive processing just think of it as referring to a theory about living systems which it proposes that we sort of minimize uncertainty about our sensory inputs by exploring, interacting with the environment and we have an internal model of the world, so to speak, and that can all be controversial. This whole internal model thing. You've probably heard me talk about quite a lot here, but the point is just to think of it as this minimizing surprise, because actually surprise has a lot to do with play, as you'll hear in this conversation, and how we deal with uncertainty, how it develops throughout our lives, how our lives develop through play to some extent.
Speaker 2:Julian has written quite some papers about active inference and he has a different take on it than Carl, so you will hear us talk about that a little bit here. He's coming out of more the ecological psychology side of things. If you remember my conversation with Harry Heft, we talked about ecological psychology and this term affordances, which doesn't mean they're good or bad, it's just opportunities for behavior in the environment. We talked about JJ Gibson, who Harry Heft wasa student of and Gibson's one of the founders of this and he used this term affordances. I'll link to that episode Again. You don't need to listen to all those episodes before now, but there are a lot of threads that come from many of the other discussions I've had. And I also want to mention the Active Inference Institute which I've worked with, and there's a video there between Darius, who did quite some interesting conversations relative to active inference with many different people, and he did one with Julian. So if you want to go into the really detailed, nerdy side of active inference and Julian's writing about it and phenomenology, then I will suggest that conversation and I will link to it for you. This conversation is a little bit lighter. It definitely gets lighter about halfway through and we start really talking about how these ideas relate to academia, to our everyday life to where we are right now in a lot of different ways.
Speaker 2:And we do talk about affordances. So that word just means opportunities for behavior. Again, if you think about a lake and a rock or an old piece of wood beside the lake, if I walk there it will afford me a place to sit, it might afford an insect a home, it might be in the way of someone who's trying to put their boat in. There's all these different kinds of affordances depending on who you are, what you are, what your body is, what your goal is. So that's all with that affordances word. We do talk about them as relational here. There's a lot of different ways to think about them. But this word relational you've probably heard come up in a lot of other podcasts in different ways, maybe with bio, or Karen Berard has come up and her idea of relational. There's a lot of ways of thinking about it. This one is more the embodied cognition and ecological psychology idea of how we shape our behavior.
Speaker 2:One thing I want to mention here is that we talk about safety and this space of safety that is necessary for play. I think that's an interesting idea that we think about here when we talk about playfulness, and that playfulness is actually a driving force of creation, also of survival. It's important for us even when we're adults. And what does that mean? Are we safe to do that now, especially within the realms and the walls of work and academia? We talk about surprise and risk, how these are essential for our development, but also, in a weird, seemingly paradoxical way, we also need to be safe in order to really move through those ideas, those moods, those emotions, those experiences that can allow us surprise and risk. So how do we have both of those at once? How do we not get stuck in a tractor state I think it was Tom and I talked about attractors a bit and Julian and I talk about it here through more of a medical or psychiatric lens of these attractors that we sort of get stuck in, think of it as sort of looping around and around in the same patterns or habits, and sometimes play disruption, which is a part of play, can, you know, jolt us out of that, zap us into another place. But when it comes to some very serious illnesses, which we also talk about here, that looks a little different, but still it's worth considering. It's funny.
Speaker 2:I was listening to this conversation. I remembered way back, when Google was something fresh and I don't know. It was another world and Google used to have these playgrounds where you could actually play when you work there. You would have playtime. It was a new idea, I mean. I know now workspaces are completely different, but they have almost become something else, not places to play, even if they're still designed in certain ways for co-working and so forth. But I wonder about this idea of play, especially in the tech world, what it really means these days and that old spirit of you know having playgrounds and playtime. What was that? It almost seems just really far away. Now. There's a lot of change going on, obviously, and in that context this conversation makes even more sense and fills even deeper.
Speaker 2:Today, in this moment, what does it mean for us to work together?
Speaker 2:How do we find meaning in those spaces, those workspaces?
Speaker 2:What kind of work do we want to do in the future? How do we find sensual ways of being alive, helping one another, getting through? You'll also hear Julian talk about how he was really influenced by another guest that was on here, evan Thompson. So another thread. Actually there's even more. But we even get to a question about love and how it relates to all of this. Surprise, surprise, it comes at the end.
Speaker 2:So today, wherever you are, whatever space you're in, I hope you find a little time to play, hope you make some space, hope someone helps you hold that space or you find a way to hold it for yourself, or you find someone to help hold the space for, and just do something that lifts your spirit. Feel a little free, free in your body, as your body in the world. Just dance around. We can all do that. Find a song you like or you used to like and listen to it and dance around. Don't worry if you feel silly, that's part of it. And if you sit with the silliness or you let yourself go into it a little bit, you might actually find something strange and delightful happens. All right, here we go. Okay, julian, so just to start, how did you get into studying mind and why play?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so how did I get into doing all of these very different things about the mind From the Varela Thompson and Roche embodied mind this is what I discovered as an undergraduate in the 1990s. I came across this amazing book, the Embodied Mind, and it was giving me a way of thinking about how to bring together mind, body and human experience, and as an undergraduate that was something that was fascinating me. I was puzzled by, and here was a book that managed to tie together cognitive science, buddhist philosophy, phenomenology and show how to connect those very different traditions to address this question of how to bring together mind, body and experience consciousness and how to fit that into the physical world. And and I was interested in Buddhism as well I hadn't really encountered phenomenology yet. And then I read this book and it was bringing together, it was addressing the questions of how to fit human experience into a scientific understanding of the world, but doing that in a way that also connected to buddhism. So I found that very inspiring, and all of my work, I should say, is collaborative.
Speaker 1:So I love to work with other people and I find that, uh, I can write at my best when I'm in dialogue with others, and so a lot of my best papers the ones I'm most proud of are ones that I've co-authored with other people, and somebody that I've found very inspiring to work with is mark miller, who is based at the university of toronto, and, uh, with mark we've been, we've been exploring, like the the dark side of, uh, mental life. Uh, by looking at major depression, addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder, with my colleagues here in Amsterdam I work in a psychiatry department. So we've been thinking a lot about how to make sense of mental illness, the experience of mental illness and what's happening neurobiologically. And, yeah, the predictive processing, free energy ideas as you're exploring with Carl as well, actually in relation to schizophrenia are very helpful for providing a framework that can integrate the biological processes, the psychological processes and also the the phenomenological side to mental illness. It provides us with formal tools that that really allow us to bring together these otherwise difficult to integrate strands of what is a very complex phenomena.
Speaker 1:So then we started to think well, could you flip this around and start to think about how things can go well for a person? So not only thinking about how predictive processing can lead to people having what we call a suboptimal grip on the world, but what would it be for predictive processing to be able to model human flourishing or people who are happy, people who feel like they're satisfied with their lives. So that's the big question that we had Could you use predictive processing both to understand mental illness, but also to understand subjective well-being or when things go well for a person in their life? And yeah, that's what then led us to think well, maybe there's a way in which play can help us with that question of what is it to be well and for things to go well.
Speaker 2:And when you were looking in both those cases, when you're looking at something that we've called mental illness, what do you think you're doing with the FEP, or with the free energy principle, or with active inference? Are you trying to notice patterns? Are you trying to find a way to externally communicate about what you're noticing in these? Like, how would you describe that to someone who doesn't really understand? Basically, what I'm asking you is what is, what is modeling?
Speaker 1:what do you think of that as there's two ways I want to answer that question.
Speaker 1:The first is to to go back to francisco varela again. He had this idea of creating what he called a circulation between different ways of knowing the mind, between a third person way of knowing the mind, which is what we arrive at through doing science and through mathematics, through, in his case, dynamical systems theory, which is what he was using to understand, to formally understand how the brain works, and then this first person subjective experience that we have of being embodied creatures in the world. We have this, these different ways of knowing, different perspectives, and we need, I think, the challenge in cognitive science as I see it, one that you see beautifully articulated in the embodied mind, is to create this circulation between these different ways of knowing. There's lots to say about that circulation, but what the free energy principle does is give us some formal tools, I think, for for um, creating generative passages, as forela called them, between our lived experience and our neurophysiological and neurobiological processes. So mathematics gives us this kind of neutral vocabulary with which to create this circulation between these otherwise different ways of knowing.
Speaker 2:That's wonderful, and maybe here you should say how your version or I don't know how to say that, but your take on free energy and this is a little bit different or is illuminating something in a way that people have found very helpful. There's this debate right of realism versus instrumentalism or something like that, where we think we can either describe the world or we can predict it, and somehow there's this way where you can't be both a realist and just think that theories are tools, and I feel like you've shown, or in your collaborations, that there's another way to think about this, the literal fallacy. I think you and your co-writers the literalist fallacy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so maybe you want to for people who are thinking of active inference.
Speaker 2:In a certain way. What's important about your take on it? That that you want them to know yeah, so this is.
Speaker 1:This goes back to the, the model and the map model, map territory fallacy, how to think about the relationship between the free energy principle, active inference as a set of modeling tools, and the system, the target system that we're trying to model, which is the embodied creature in the world. And so I think the first thing I want to say about that is that it's important to think that the model is an abstraction or an idealization. And so this goes back to your conversation with Evan Thompson recently and the blind spot that we shouldn't make the mistake of taking what is an abstraction and idealization and mistaking that for reality, and I think you can find places in my writings where perhaps I'm not suitably careful about that.
Speaker 1:So yeah but I think that that that my meta perspective on this is is always to start from human experience as what is concretely real, and then we need to somehow bring that into conversation and dialogue with what we know about our minds from studying them scientifically.
Speaker 1:So there's different ways of knowing here that we need to bring into dialogue with each other.
Speaker 1:So what we might do then is give some kind of literal reality to the free energy principle as a model and think, well, if what's being modeled is real so there really are these processes that are where there's prediction error being computed and there's predictions that are being made top down and this is really going on in the brain then there there must be this literal computation taking place in the brain.
Speaker 1:The brain must literally be a computer, and part of what we try to do is to say well, that's one way of being a realist, but we don't think that realism requires that kind of literalism about prediction error, minimization or approximation of Bayesian inference. Instead, we can think that the model is giving us formal tools and those formal tools are mapping out some reality for us scientifically. So that gives us a way of being a realist about what science is doing. But we don't need to think that the algorithms that are being computed here are ones that the, that neurons or the wetware of the brain is literally implementing. We can think instead that the models are more like fictional realities that allow us to do counterfactual modeling, for instance of the brain. So they are giving us knowledge of something real, but we don't then need to impute them with literal reality. These kinds of models.
Speaker 1:What we've tried in the in our philosophy of science work on the on the free energy principle. That gives us like a middle way, I think, between a very literal understanding of the free energy principle and a purely instrumental one, like in his hippolyto and maxwell ramstead sometimes offer and in your discussion with carl as well, he he tended to use this formulation of well, it's as if the brain were doing bayesian inference or were minimizing free energy and that as if qualifier. There is often what encourages people to be instrumentalists, but the philosophy of science, literature, I allows for a more nuanced position which is neither literalist nor instrumentalist. So that's what we've been exploring. Michael Pertroff has a new book on scientific modeling that is coming out soon with MIT, where he develops this line of argument further. So he's done a lot more thinking on this since we did that work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my view is a little bit different from Michael's, probably that I want to be a bit more pragmatist. I think about, about scientific models and scientific explanations. So the kind of realism that I would go for would be more about keeping the whole context of the scientific techniques that we're using, the phenomena that are created by the use of those scientific techniques, and being a bit more careful about what realism is exactly, being a bit more careful about what realism is exactly, which takes us back to the realism, idealism and the phenomenological pragmatist ideas that are kind of the foundations for my philosophical worldview, as it were.
Speaker 2:What's play? Where did play come in for you?
Speaker 1:How did we end up with play? That's an excellent question. It kind of grew out of our work on predictive processing and active inference. In that literature you find this idea of epistemic actions, so actions that are for seeking out new information, for resolving uncertainty, and there's an emotional or affect.
