we need to understand what the tradition is that he is feeding from and how what his orientation is he is 00:01:21 taking his own work to be an extension of the work of immanuel kant now if you have not noticed anything in the history of philosophy of mind please 00:01:33 notice descartes and kant those are the two principal landmarks so many others but kant had died at the very start of the 19th century kant was working within a 00:01:46 physical framework that was newtonian in which space and time are simply blocks containers within which things unfold mechanistically that was the metaphysics available to 00:02:00 kant was asking with that metaphysics how do we come to know anything now he had the cogito of descartes very much on his mind but also the the empiricists 00:02:14 concerns with the role of the senses following the tradition of hume and kant attempted to resolve this by noting that there were some things that could not be learned from the world that had 00:02:27 to be in place before any knowledge of the world can happen at all he called these the synthetic a prioris those things that well nothing forces the manas but we can't begin to make 00:02:38 sense of the notion of knowledge without prior notions of time and space and causality this is a difficult position to occupy and can't argumentation was developed in very many ways and gave rise to very many 00:02:53 different kinds of science thereafter for the thing in itself this shell is not knowable rather i encountered a phenomenon of the shell the phenomenon of the shell 00:03:11 through mediated through the senses and the body and i can never thus get to the shell itself this is of course the paradox underlying all representational theories 00:03:22 of perception which is that they seem to leave you estranged from the world and not in contact with the world all knowledge seem to be mediated through the sensors so it need you need 00:03:34 to bootstrap knowledge with these synthetic api ras for accounts this is immanuel kant dies at the start of the 19th century and then about 00:03:45 1870 something like scientific psychology starts to emerge and there's a wide variety of approaches they're drawing among other things from kant but they're not following one 00:03:58 unified agenda funux comes in here and he sees himself as taking kant seriously and he's going to develop in his context in the 1920s and 1930s 00:04:10 the notion of a synthetic a priori changes now instead of the physicalist model of time and space and as containers that we have with kant the body is the ultimate synthetic a 00:04:22 priori for von neux cool epistemology or how a being comes to know the world will only be ever understood through careful attention to the structures of and processes of the body

We approach the problem of the extended mind from a radically non-dualistperspective. The separation between mind and matter is an artefact of the outdatedmechanistic worldview, which leaves no room for mental phenomena such as agency,intentionality, or feeling. We propose to replace it by an action ontology, which conceivesmind and matter as aspects of the same network of processes. By adopting the intentionalstance, we interpret the catalysts of elementary reactions as agents exhibiting desires,intentions, and sensations. Autopoietic networks of reactions constitute more complex super-agents, which moreover exhibit memory, deliberation and sense-making. In the specific caseof social networks, individual agents coordinate their actions via the propagation ofchallenges. The distributed cognition that emerges from this interaction cannot be situated inany individual brain. This non-dualist, holistic view extends and operationalizes processmetaphysics and Eastern philosophies. It is supported by both mindfulness experiences andmathematical models of action, self-organization, and cognition.

Ehrenfeld (2008) concurs with McDonough and Braungart, in his plea for a holistic approach towards sustainability: “Our society is addicted to reductionist ways of solving virtually all our problems. ... Over time, as we engage more and more in this practice, society’s (as well as individual’s) competence to address the complicated, messy problems we confront has diminished. Unsustainability is just such a messy problem. Reductionism will not make it go away.” (Ehrenfeld, 2008, p. 11-12)