“A Community of Minds”

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Jun 6, 2024

The podcast features Michel Bitbol, a multidimensional thinker, discussing the synergy of medicine, physics, Buddhist philosophy, and consciousness theories. He delves into existential questions, the evolution of his interests, quantum philosophy, and common blind spots in scientific work. The conversation challenges fixed self-perception and explores diverse disciplines to unravel the complexities of self-awareness.

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INSIGHT

Holistic Intellectual Synthesis

Michel Bitbol integrated medicine, physics, and philosophy from early on to understand life and consciousness holistically.
His initial questions evolved into discerning the nature of a universe correlated with consciousness.

INSIGHT

First-Person Experience Matters

First-person experience deeply shaped Bitbol's philosophy, sparked by a sense of flatness in projecting concepts onto perception.
Discovering Husserl's work confirmed his experience, forming a community of like-minded researchers.

ANECDOTE

Meeting Francisco Varela

Bitbol described an engaging first meeting with Francisco Varela discussing quantum mechanics and enaction despite initial disagreement.
They shared a feeling of congeniality, leading to ongoing collaboration until Varela's untimely death.

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My guest today is the brilliant multidimensional thinker Michel Bitbol, a rare mind that is as well versed in medicine and physics as it is in Buddhist philosophy and micro-phenomenology. Michel is Emeritus Director of Research at the CNRS, in Paris, France. He is presently based at the Archives Husserl, a center of research in phenomenology. He received successively his M.D., his Ph.D. in physics, and his “Habilitation” in philosophy in Paris.

As you’ll see in the show notes, his copious bibliography traces the evolution of his interlocking interests and his thinking about the role of phenomenology in theories of consciousness, the parallels between Buddhist dependent arising and certain Western theories of knowledge, and most relevantly for our conversation today, quantum philosophy and the common blind spots in the work of a scientist. His two most recent works, which you might want to check out are: Philosophie quantique. Le monde est-il extérieur? (Editions Mimésis) and Mettre fin aux controverses (Editions du cerf), a translation and scholarly commentary of Nagarjuna.

Michel’s mind is much like a kaleidoscope, and one which reveals and describes concepts with an astonishing degree of lucidity. In this first segment of my conversation with him, it was a pleasure to follow him into the past to describe the early synergy between his interests in medicine, physics, Buddhism, and philosophy, the existential questions that drove his intellectual curiosity, the revelation of first reading the writings of Husserl, how he first made contact with Francisco Varela and the congeniality he found there despite apparent disagreement, and the idea of generating a ‘mindful science,’ one which is mindful of its own situated origins. This was only the introduction to Michel’s thinking, and so we hope you’ll tune in again for the following two episodes, in which we’ll dive more deeply into Michel’s work in quantum mechanics and the nature of experience itself.

Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleonor Rosch, The Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 1991 and 2016)

Some key titles by Michel Bitbol:

L'aveuglante proximité du réel, Champs-Flammarion, 1998.

Physique et Philosophie de l'Esprit, Flammarion, 2000.

De l'intérieur du monde. Pour une philosophie et une science des relations, Flammarion, 2010.

La conscience a-t-elle une origine ? : des neurosciences à la pleine conscience : une nouvelle approche de l'esprit, Flammarion, 2014.

Maintenant la finitude. Peut-on penser l'absolu?, Flammarion, 2019.

Philosophie quantique. Le monde est-il extérieur?, Éditions Mimésis, 2023.

Mettre fin aux controverses, Éditions du cerf, 2023.

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