Victor Cary

The interesting thing about meaning is that it is always relational, it is always emerging as we tell our stories and respond to one another.

As I discussed with philosopher and cognitive scientist Andrea Hiott recently, implicit in our embodiment is also our embeddedness in our environment, how we enact our agency, and how our cognition is extended through others.

Abstract thought is essential; the issue comes when it disconnects us from a contextual reality. McGilchrist put it beautifully: abstraction can be viewed as the removal of context in place of a false certainty.

cognition isn’t an abstract process happening in our heads, but inseparable from our physicality and our environment. All our mental concepts come from our bodies, and understanding what that really means that can help us reconnect to authentic conversations, re-establish trust in the social contract, and kick-start cultural evolution.

Collectively, we’re going through something like a death, in which over-abstraction is crashing into physical reality. The liberal world order is gone, and across multiple domains, from education and economics to immigration policy and climate change, we’re wrestling with what it means to let go of ideas about what should be and face what is.

Instead, allow multiple visions to coexist and use them all together to prioritise action today that will make them all likelier and/or clearer.

Because when you train artificial intelligence on a world soaked in inequity, saturated with bias, and riddled with disinformation, you don’t get fairness. You get injustice at scale. You don’t get objectivity. You get bias with an interface. You don’t get solutions. You get systems that do harm faster, deeper, and with more plausible deniability t... See more

Our country has urgent problems and solving them requires the civic solidarity that thinking of ourselves as Americans helps to create. The historian Richard Slotkin has observed that a workable American identity must join both the descendants of the Indigenous and those who dispossessed them, the line of the enslaved and those who possessed them, ... See more