Relational Ontology, the Myth of Free Will, and Living in the Question with Ximena

You are not a separate, sovereign self floating through the world making your own choices in a vacuum. You are a node in a web — and that isn't a loss of freedom, it's the thing that was supposed to make you feel less alone the whole time.

Ximena used to believe safety lived in answers. In clarity, in certainty, in having the right conclusion to point to. Then she started asking what is real, how do we know, and how do we live, and found that the ground kept moving no matter how hard she gripped it.

The perspective shift that changed everything for her wasn't finding better answers. It was learning to live inside the questions themselves. Discovering that the "separate individual" she'd been sold her whole life was never actually real.

Today’s conversation is a masterclass in thinking differently and wearing incredibly light philosophical robes. Ones that blend with the modern era instead of distract from it. It's about tentacular ontology and why the octopus is a better model for the self than the eagle. It's about why your nervous system craves false dichotomies (and who benefits from selling them to you). And it's about why the most radical thing you can do with a large language model (AI chatbot), a scary headline, or a philosophical crisis might be to just ask it a better question.

Together, Ximena and Ashley dive into:

• Why Ximena feels like she's returned to her "caterpillar stage" after reaching her butterfly era — and why she loves it there
• The shift from intellectualizing feelings to actually locating them in the body, taste, and color
• Phenomenology: why experiencing something comes before naming or categorizing it
• Donna Haraway's tentacular thinking — the octopus versus the eagle as two totally different ways of relating to reality
• Substance ontology vs. relational ontology, and why the difference reshapes your entire ethics
• The illusion of the sovereign, separate self and why "freedom" as individualism might actually just be loneliness in disguise
• Sympoiesis — the idea that nothing makes itself, everything is made together
• Why false dichotomies feel so relieving to the nervous system (and why that relief is manufactured, not earned)
• A real debate on whether large language models can actually "think," and why Ximena says thinking is an ecological, embodied process
• The masks of domination falling — and the discomfort and possibility that live in that tension
• Curiosity as a daily practice: how noticing something as small as a change in the smell of the air can become a philosophical practice
• Why boredom is a lost art, and why productivity culture is actively eroding your capacity to ask good questions
• Ximena's two offerings: Rooted Impact, a 13-week philosophical formation program, and Mythos, a seasonal deep-dive into humanity's greatest stories
• The dream Ximena is finally ready to build in real life

Work with Ximena:

• Join Rooted Impact — a 13 week philosophical formation program for people who sense that the dominant story isn't working and want the intellectual tools to understand why, and the imagination to think past it. Philosophy that meets Mysticism. Now enrolling for September 2026.

• Mythos — a seasonal exploration, a lens for understanding the world, yourself, and the complexity of human experience delivered through some of the most powerful stories ever told.