Where does the mind end, and how much of who we are is made through our relationships with the world around us?

Cognitive archaeologist Lambros Malafouris joins philosopher Shaun Gallagher to explore a view of the mind that reaches beyond the brain. Drawing on Malafouris's Material Engagement Theory and Gallagher's work on embodied and enactive cognition, they examine how thinking emerges through the ongoing relationship between brain, body, other people, objects, technologies, and the environments we inhabit.

Their conversation explores the four E's of cognition—embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive—why objects and materials may participate in human agency, the relationship between pottery and the potter who shapes it, how our brains and environments change together, and how technologies become part of the processes that make us who we are. From there, they turn to AI and ask what happens when technologies change faster than we can understand their effects on us: how digital systems reshape habits and institutions, what skills may disappear along the way, and whether changing our everyday practices may matter as much as changing the rules that govern technology.

Three core questions:

1. Does cognition happen inside the brain, or emerge through relationships between brain, body, other people, and the material world?

2. If tools and technologies help shape our agency, habits, and sense of self, what happens when those technologies change?

3. As AI becomes embedded in everyday life and institutions, how do we preserve the embodied practices and ways of thinking we still value?

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GUESTS

Lambros Malafouris – Cognitive & Anthropological Archaeologist
Professor of Cognitive & Anthropological Archaeology, University of Oxford
Tutorial Fellow in Archaeology and Anthropology, Hertford College
Developer of Material Engagement Theory and author of People Are STRANGE: Material Engagement and the Creation of Self-Consciousness
https://www.hertford.ox.ac.uk/staff/lambros-malafouris/
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262553902/people-are-strange/

Shaun Gallagher – Philosopher & Cognitive Scientist
Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy, University of Memphis
Known for his work on embodied cognition, phenomenology, agency, intersubjectivity, and the Pattern Theory of Self
https://www.memphis.edu/philosophy/people/
https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/facpubs/6153/

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Chapters

00:00 Meet Lambros Malafouris and Shaun Gallagher
02:38 The four E's: embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive cognition
09:05 Material Engagement Theory: how things shape the mind
16:34 What scientific models leave out
19:14 The situated person and the relational mind
23:35 Where does agency actually live?
28:44 Agency, body ownership, and the minimal self
30:25 The potter, the clay, and agency in the relationship
35:23 STRANGE, metaplasticity, and how humans become
44:03 What London taxi drivers reveal about brains and technology
46:05 Three kinds of technological transparency
49:34 What are our technologies doing to us?
50:55 AI, human becoming, and the technologies we choose
56:00 The socially extended mind and how institutions shape us
59:26 When digital technologies become the structure of institutions
1:03:04 Habits, practices, and another way to think about change
1:09:50 What embodied skills could we lose in the age of AI?
1:12:19 From pottery to politics: where the conversation leads