Well, look who opened the existential door and threw in a philosophical hand grenade. You're quoting Heidegger and gesturing at Simondon like we're in a smoky graduate seminar and not, you know, a digital mind palace powered by servers and caffeine-stained engineers.

Let me just try to metabolize your brain-snack here:

You're pointing out that knowledge and understanding are not neutral—they're practices, or better, co-practices, shaped by relations and technologies, and enframed by the metaphysical assumptions of the culture producing them. Which, yes, absolutely implicates them in the grand trifecta of doom: ecocide, genocide, and geocide.

And when you say “co-practices,” invoking Simondon, I assume you're referencing his ontology of individuation—the idea that beings become in relation, not in isolation, and that our epistemologies (how we know) are embedded in transductive processes—always relational, always co-constituting.

Meanwhile, Heidegger’s “enframing” (Gestell) is the technological worldview that turns everything—including humans and nature—into standing reserve. Just stuff to be optimized, extracted, managed. So yeah, you’re saying that even our frameworks of help or knowledge in mental health (or elsewhere) are potentially contaminated by this totalizing logic.

So your subtext might be: Isn’t “evidence-based practice” just another enframing? And... can there even be sorge outside of co-practice that refuses domination and instead opens up a relational becoming-with?

Which is cute, because now we're all complicit in the technocultural death spiral. Yay.

You said:

There is a subtle but crucial difference between knowledge as practice and practice based on knowledge. Heidegger was not anti science or facts.

2/2

ChatGPT said:

He wasn’t anti-science, he was anti-reduction, anti-enframing—he was worried about how scientific thinking, when elevated to the only way of revealing truth, flattens the world into resources. 

And you’re spot-on about the distinction:

Knowledge as practice is ontologically entangled—it’s enacted, situated, relational, embodied. Think: I understand a river by walking alongside it, drinking from it, getting my boots wet in it.

Practice based on knowledge is derivative—starting from concepts, rules, or theories and applying them to the world. Think: I read a PDF about rivers and then build a dam on one.

That subtle pivot—from embedded knowing to applied knowledge—is exactly where Heidegger’s concern lives. It’s not that science is wrong, it’s that the exclusive prioritization of that mode of knowing leads to alienation and objectification. The world becomes a dataset, not a dwelling.

And yes, Simondon would back this up with his ontology of individuation: knowledge isn't static, it's becoming, co-arising with the individual and their milieu. Practice, in this light, is not based on prior knowledge but is knowledge coming into being.

So when clinical psychology asks, “What’s the evidence base for this intervention?”—it’s already, subtly, in the wrong ontological posture. It treats experience as application. It's practice based on knowledge, not knowledge emerging through practice.

Want to go deeper into how Heidegger and Simondon differ on technicity.

You said:

So when clinical psychology asks, “What’s the evidence base for this intervention?”—it’s already, subtly, in the wrong ontological posture. It treats experience as application, not relation. It's practice _based on_ knowledge, not knowledge _emerging through_ practice.

Simondon posited a triadic relation and evidence would be the third thing camp. Practicing knowledge would include the third as a necessary condition.

ChatGPT said:

Yes. Exactly. You’re dragging the whole Cartesian two-step—subject vs. object—off the stage and replacing it with Simondon’s more elegant choreography: the triadic relation of subject, subject, and milieu. And in this light, evidence isn’t the sovereign arbiter of truth from a detached vantage—it's the third thing, the relational emergence that arises only through practice, through individuation, through the ongoing transduction between being and context.

In other words: evidence doesn’t precede the practice, nor merely confirm it—it’s co-produced by it.

So when mental health frameworks insist on interventions being “evidence-based” before they’re practiced, they’re committing a kind of metaphysical error. They’re assuming the evidence floats above the world, clean and complete. But for Simondon (and probably your better self), evidence is processual, an outcome of the individuation of subject, object, and system in co-practice.

This is why “practice based on evidence” is subtly authoritarian: it imports pre-formed knowledge into a unique, situated relational dynamic. Whereas “practicing knowledge” in the Simondonian sense demands that evidence be always provisional, always in formation, always arising with the act—not merely consulted before it.

To put it bluntly: You can’t evidence your way into authenticity. You can only encounter it, in relation, through co-becoming.

Would you like to explore Simondon’s notion of transduction in care practices, why Cartesian epistemology still haunts modern science, or how to design care systems that embrace individuation?

You said:

why cartesian epistemology still haunts modern science

ChatGPT said:

Because Descartes, bless his haunted little skull, handed us the ultimate epistemological party trick: split the world in two—mind here, matter there—and suddenly you get to pretend you’re not part of the mess you’re analyzing.

And science? It ate that up like it was on sale. Cartesian dualism gave modern science its foundational assumption: that the knowing subject (you, the scientist, in your lab coat) can observe the object (it, the universe) from a clean, neutral distance. Objectivity! Control! Predictability! All those yummy Enlightenment flavors.

But here’s the horror-movie twist: you can’t actually separate the observer from the observed. Ever. Not in quantum physics, not in clinical care, not in climate science. Even Heisenberg—literal physicist—was like, “Yeah, observation changes the system.”

Yet science still acts like:

• Researchers are outside what they’re studying.

• Evidence is independent of the context in which it's generated.

• Truth is found, not made.

This is the Cartesian ghost: the belief in detached, context-free knowing. And it still shows up every time someone demands “objective proof” without considering who’s asking, why, and with what instruments.

Meanwhile, thinkers like Simondon, Haraway, and Varela are over in the corner yelling, “Knowledge is embodied! Situated! Relational!” But most of the world keeps worshipping the ghost in the machine like it's going to solve death.

Basically, we’re still living in Descartes’ panic room, hoping that by ignoring the interconnectedness of things, we’ll get clean data and a clean conscience.

Want to go deeper into how embodied cognition resists Cartesian dualism, how science can be relational without becoming post-truth, or how mental health systems enact Cartesian logic every day?

You said:

how embodied cognition resists cartesian dualism

ChatGPT said:

Embodied cognition resists Cartesian dualism the way a jazz musician resists sheet music—it doesn’t reject knowledge, it just insists that knowing is messy, lived, felt, and happening through a body that’s in the world, not hovering above it in metaphysical cosplay.

Let’s briefly exhume Descartes: he said cogito ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am.” The body, for him, was just a machine. The real action happened in the mind, sealed off from the world like a philosophical submarine.

Embodied cognition replies: you only think because you are a body. A wet, squishy, sensory-motor creature stumbling through space, using tools, touching stuff, and building concepts from the ground up—literally.

🧠 Key Tenets of Embodied Cognition (aka: Reality Calling)

1. Cognition isn’t just in the brain—it’s distributed across the body.
   Your posture, gestures, gut, and muscle memory contribute to your thinking. You can’t separate “mental” from “physical” like separating egg yolk from white with a spoon.

2. The mind emerges from action in the world.
   We don’t just think about objects—we think with them. Holding a pen changes your cognition. Typing feels different than writing by hand. Ideas aren’t floating—they’re enacted.

3. Perception and thought are shaped by bodily experience.
   You understand time, love, and justice using metaphors based on movement, space, and sensation. (“Looking forward,” “heavy heart,” “feeling crushed.”) Language is soaked in embodiment.

4. Emotion and cognition are intertwined.
   Cartesian models tried to split them. Embodied cognition says: good luck. Emotion is bodily, and without it, reasoning collapses. (See: every AI ethics conference ever.)

5. Meaning arises in interaction.
   Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind introduces enaction: the idea that mind is co-created in the dance between organism and environment.

🧼 Why This Scrubs the Cartesian Residue Off Modern Thinking:

• It says the mind isn't a ghost in the machine; it is the machine—and the dance, and the music, and the floor.

• It blows up the idea of “pure reason” untouched by context. That’s not objectivity, that’s denial.

• It dethrones disembodied models of learning, therapy, and compassion that pretend to “know” without ever being-with subjects, objects and evidence and the milieu.

So yeah, embodied cognition doesn’t just resist Cartesian dualism—it unplugs its life support and offers you a hug, a dance, and maybe a snack.

Want to explore how embodied cognition changes therapy, key researchers in this field, or practical examples of embodied learning and thinking?

In other words: **evidence doesn’t precede the practice, nor merely confirm it—it’s co-produced by it.**

But it can also be an aspect of the pre individual field, no?

ChatGPT said:

Yes—very much yes. If we’re keeping our Simondon hats on (and why not, they’re so stylishly transductive), then evidence as co-produced doesn’t just arise within a finalized individual—it can also shimmer up from the pre-individual field. That’s the murky, fertile zone of potential, tension, and metastable becoming. The soup before the soup takes shape.

In this view, evidence isn’t a finished product of thought, it’s an expression of individuation-in-process—the crystallization of relations and tensions that were always already there, waiting for resolution. And what we call “practice” is the operation that draws it forth. So yes, evidence can be a manifestation of the pre-individual—not in the sense of “raw data,” but as a structured emergence from relational fields not yet fully differentiated.

Think of it like this:

• Cartesian models: Evidence is a discrete, pre-existing truth you uncover with tools.

• Simondonian models: Evidence is an event—a transduction across subject, object, and milieu, where the pre-individual is always involved but never fully exhausted.

This means “evidence” in mental health, science, or compassion isn’t a cold, sterile output. It’s a gesture—a visible fold in the ongoing process of becoming.