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Bonnitta Roy ft Anna Ciaunica Live Watch Party
Belonging To Each Other: Nested Bodies, Nested Selves & The Intimate Chain of Beings
“All of us here have been inside another body.”
When Anna Ciaunica says this, she is not being poetic; she is reminding us that every human mind is first an interaction between two living systems. Our earliest experiences are relational, long before they become reflective.
Next Sunday, June 29th, we will gather for an Originals Watch Party to explore this radical reframing of mind and body. Bonnitta Roy has selected key moments from her recent, wide-ranging conversation with Anna—cognitive neuroscientist, philosopher, and self-described “Trojan horse” inside the lab.
In this Originals Episode, Anna Ciaunica and Bonnitta Roy discuss major opportunities to make progress in the philosophy of consciousness. Anna's work focuses on where the separation between minds and environment most clearly break down, especially the developing child in utero and the dynamic mutual interactions between the child’s emerging cognition and immune system and the mother’s. Anna’s research emphasizes that the brain is part of the body and critiques investigating the mind solely from an adult, individual, cognitively sophisticated perspective, proposing instead a “developmental turn,” that studies a universal genealogical continuity: all bodies emerge from other bodies.
Anna Ciaunica is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London. She is a philosopher and cognitive scientist interested in interdisciplinary approaches to embodied cognition. My research focuses on the relationship between (a)typical forms of self-consciousness and social interactions. Specifically, she investigates what self-consciousness is and how it develops in relation to our body and our physical and social environment and the effect of interacting with humans versus artificial others (robots, Virtual Reality characters and Artificial Intelligence) on the human mind and body.
Individuation, Entanglement, & What it Means to Be Nature
Bonnitta Roy and Ezequiel Di Paolo discuss an enactive approach to cognition, moving beyond traditional representational and computational views. They highlight the deep continuity between life, mind, and language, arguing that cognitive processes are not solely brain-based but arise from the ongoing interactions of embodied agents with their environment. Bonnie and Ezequiel highlight the precarious autonomy of all living systems, from single-celled organisms to linguistic beings, and outlines Ezequiel's four dimensions of embodiment – organic, sensory-motor, intersubjective, and linguistic – emphasizing their co-dependent interactions rather than a simple hierarchical structure. They also discuss the the role of language in participatory sense-making and the negotiation of norms, revealing that even abstract cognitive abilities are grounded in embodied, relational processes.
In his book Critical Path, Buckminster Fuller described the sequence of crucial tasks that humanity must follow to ensure prosperity on Earth. I am sure that 2025 will be a critical path year, either tilting toward vitality and renewed life on earth or nudging us toward an irrevocable point of collapse toward conflict and destruction.
Along with the myriad paths society will follow, the choices we make in our communities will matter the most … Let’s walk this critical path together.
Making good choices is not just a matter of collecting information like the big data centers or surveillance operations do. Collective intelligence is not the same as collecting intelligence! This critical distinction is being undermined by the techno-digerati flooding our feeds with incessant announcements about AI breakthroughs. Every day, they ratchet up the volume on the power of the machines — now running a quadrillion bits of information and consuming an entire nations-worth of energy.
Originals is building a countervailing wave to push back this disbiotic tide. To be successful, this conversation needs many more voices, in private and public, in intimate spaces as well as spaces of contention, in politics, philosophy, literature and art.
It is our dream to harness the power of true collective intelligence, that which is sourced from the living earth, courses through the biosphere and animates human bodies in word and deed, and has, to this very moment and beyond, shielded us from the kind of nihilism and despair that otherwise would destroy our conviction to build a future we want to live in.
~ Bonnitta Roy