the Navigational Approach to Mind

Mind is the navigational action of bodies, from the individual to the ecological

Mind is the navigational action of the body; it is first and always bodily.

We learn that mind is ‘in our heads’ but mind is a full body experience, and beyond. Minds are ways we move as individuals, relationships, encounters and ecologies. Minds are actions bodies are making, ways we extend with one another as nested scales of life.

A navigational approach to mind does not require choosing whether everything is mental or everything is physical. To understand the mind of a living creature from the navigational approach, we ask: what is this living body we are observing and through what landscape is it making way? In other words, how is it ‘mattering’?

As we observe, we notice that bodies are making way through multiple landscapes at once. Mind is the body’s navigational action in all spaces of life, from the geographical to the emotional to the social to the virtual.

This means the regularities we create for one another and the ecologies we encounter at all these levels are co-creating our bodies and minds at once.

Understanding minds as navigational action gives us a better view of the intimacy of all bodies. We notice that bodies are cognitive in their own style and that they are also always interconnected, like the paths of a landscape. All bodies are worthy.

Our experience of thinking and remembering are also movements through space.

How hard and how challenging and how wondrous that we humans can notice the ways our bodies make (as thinking and remembering and imagining); this is a precious, intimate and deeply entangled act.

It is also perilous sometimes, and that is why it so important to notice that care and love are our ongoing urge. Caring for what? Loving what? We can learn a lot when we ask what actions are oriented towards. This is also why phenomenology and the lived experience from each first-person perspective is also an experience of sharing, and to be shared.

When bodies encounter the world, they develop cognitive actions so as to make their way through these layers of life.

A dog does that in its way. Humans in theirs. A seagull another. The ecology of the dunes and seashore in each instance are also their own way-making. And yet these are also all part of the same co-creation of those same worlds, and they are also a world together.

There are so many ways to notice that life navigates, and so many happening all together at once in what we can observe at many layers and dimensions.

Still, comparing forms of life and how they make their way through all they encounter is no longer best understood as an either/or endeavor whereby we try and decide what does or does not have cognition.

What if we can begin with an ecological orientation, one which understands that a living body making its way through its life is doing so with the action we call cognitive or mind?

This opens a different world of relations.

Would love to learn more about how this might connect to your life and work.

I’ve written two master degrees on this from different angles, one in neuroscience where I studied the hippocampus which holds ‘the GPS of the brain’ and where I wrote about this from the view of the hippocampal research. The other in phenomenological heritage and urban planning. I have also written an academic philosophy and neuroscience book about it for a wider audience which will be out later this year (see link below). Additionally, my PhD dissertation in philosophy and neuroscience has also been written about this and can be read as a monograph soon. Still, I’m trying to find ways to discuss it beyond those academic realms. Inviting your thoughts paths & potentials.

🛞 Navigational Approach to Embodied Cognition
📚 Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind (and other gifts from the hippocampus): Book that tells the neuroscience story for a general audience.

🌆 Way-ability and the Cognitive Affordances of Cities

✐ Radical Embodied Relation at any Scale: From Remembering to Navigating

🎥🎙Podcast conversations on this from all sorts of paths and potentials

🎥 Conversations about this with neuroscientists & others who inspire this

🎧 Conversations with philosophers and others who inspire this

❣️ Love & Philosophy project and podcast

Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness

❣️ Available to preorder worldwide soon, still mostly in Europe and UK for now, though you can also support Shakespeare & Company, one of the most storied independent bookshops in the world by ordering it there! Or ask your local independent bookshop.

Reviews:

“When John O’Keefe and I wrote our book in the 1970s, we knew we were putting forward something radical, that the hippocampus creates cognitive maps for navigating space. At first this seemed to many to be at odds with memory research but over the years, we’ve started to see this apparent conflict resolve. This book shows us how the field of hippocampal research may be positioning us for a shift in how we understand the mind itself.”

—by Lynn Nadel, neuroscientist and co-author of The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map

“A genuinely original contribution to philosophy via cognitive neuroscience. Hiott demonstrates that holding contradictions open is not intellectual weakness but scientific enlightenment. This is an enriching and essential read (that uses all my favourite words). Hiott’s framework offers something rare—a way to honour both the mathematical precision of computational neuroscience and the irreducible reality of lived experience. Her concept of ‘way-making’ is a universal and philosophical notion that speaks to the existential imperatives of active inference: namely, how organisms minimize surprise by navigating spaces both physical and conceptual. Hippocampal research provides compelling evidence that memory and navigation do not call for reconciliation—they disclose existential processes operating across scales we are only starting to fathom.”

—by Karl Friston, neuroscientist and initiator of the Free Energy Principle

“Hiott asks us to become the contrasts and bifurcations without dismissing them, a provocative and important philosophical contribution via cognitive neuroscience. This is a real tour de force.”

—by Bernardo Kastrup, philosopher, author of more than seven books, and computer scientist

Further Selected Resources:

Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness (book)

Radical Embodied Relation at Any Scale: From Rembering to Navigating (paper)

Way-ability and cognitive affordances (urban planning)

Mind in the City

Waymaking (blog)

Navigability (videos)

Further conversations about this (videos)

Some of the interviews and diaries that happened in the making of these ideas

Crucial: All navigability is inaccurate precisely because it is a representation/model and thus limited to the position, orientation and reason for which it was made. Navigability is a heuristic towards opening perspective, not anything that can be objective. There is no ‘one’ or ‘right’ navigability. Also, ‘affordance’ does not mean ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but is a way of discussing interactive probability.These are maps, not territories, and there are many different maps that can be made of a shared space depending on what part of the territory one is hoping to better understand. Those maps are different from each position and matter differently from each position accordingly.

Ecological Mind: Tied to Something Larger

❣️ Thank you for reading these ramblings, and for your support. Wishing you joy and good luck in all your wandering & wondering.