Clerestory (Bryan Kam)

How do you balance your life’s purpose, your creative impulse, or your art, with the realities of life? Here are the first seven responses I've received. Thanks to Nasos, Romeo, Jay, Khuyen (Kasper), Joachim, Nicole, and Nathan. I'm still taking submissions. Please upload your audio response here: ⁠https://bryankam.com/record⁠. I will release episodes from responses I receive, aiming for 30-45 minute episodes after the initial "pilot." Clerestory by ⁠⁠⁠Bryan Kam⁠⁠⁠ • Infrequent updates at ⁠⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠⁠ • All my work plus exclusive content at ⁠⁠⁠Patreon

How do you balance your life’s purpose, your creative impulse, or your art, with the realities of life? Please upload your audio response here: https://bryankam.com/record. I will release episodes from responses I receive, every time I receive 45 minutes. Clerestory by ⁠⁠Bryan Kam⁠⁠ • Infrequent updates at ⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠ • All my work plus exclusive content at ⁠⁠Patreon

In this episode I spoke to my friend Eyal Shay in a series of voicenotes, recorded over a period of a few months at the start of this year. This episode is an experiment in epistolary podcasting 😊 Over the course of the pandemic I got to know people from the internet quite well through voicenotes. These were sent asynchronously to overcome timezone and calendar fatigue. In this episode, Eyal and I alternated messages with different lengths:  1 minute, then 2, 4, and 8 minutes. We sent these through WhatsApp. Clerestory by ⁠Bryan Kam⁠ • Infrequent updates at ⁠Substack⁠ • All my work plus exclusive content at ⁠Patreon

This is a continuation of the conversation I had with Maggie previously: "The Dark Forest and Generative AI." We discuss why we write, versus why to use AI and LLMs to produce writing, and what effects that loss is likely to have. Discussed in this episode: Why do humans write? Writing is around 5,000 years old We mention a note-taking system called a "Zettelkasten" which I wrote about here Writing to our future selves How do we read? Science and philosophy as conversations On getting up to speed in conversation How much to read before we should write Who wants to read GPT outputs? Roland Barthes' "The Death of the Author" (1967) The deep link between cognition, action, perception The 4Es: embodied, embedded, enacted, extended (see: enactivism) Moravec's paradox Gwern Clerestory by ⁠⁠⁠Bryan Kam⁠⁠⁠ • Infrequent updates at ⁠⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠⁠ • All my work plus exclusive content at ⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠ Show notes https://pod.fo/e/1720c4

Part 5 in a series of interviews on the book I'm working on, Neither/Nor. In this episode, ⁠⁠Isabela Granic⁠⁠ begin the discussion with Whitehead and his assertion that philosophy must be in conversation with the sciences. Topics discussed: My enormous Kuhn thread Are we in a scientific crisis? My recording of Kuhn's lecture: "Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice" (1973) Kuhn's relationship to the Buddha The Buddha's relationship to Darwin Schopenhauer and his case for using intuition versus rational reasoning Buddha’s dependent origination and how “backward causality” is precisely the process that Schopenhauer espouses in his writing about intuition, Kuhn with his observations of paradigm shifts, and Darwin with his careful consideration of catgories of species Framed this discussion and the podcast as a whole as a process of laying out the many different strands and nodes of ideas that need to be laid bare before selecting and constructing the coherent theoretical framework for Neither/Nor, the book I’m writing Recent podcasts on emptiness with Jake Orthwein and Rob Knight The Nietzsche quote I mention is this one, from a draft of Ecce Homo (1888) Hypercarnivory: https://archive.org/details/CopesRuleHypercarnivory Are we in a revolution? A crisis? To come back to: Heraclitus, Zhuangzi, Sextus Empiricus, Hannah Arendt, Kropotkin's Mutual Aid Ended with the impossible question: Are we living at the cusp of a paradigm shift? Previous episodes: Part 4 of this series: Language and Experience Part 3 of this series: ⁠AI and Pyrrhonism⁠ Part 2 of this series: ⁠⁠A Philosophical Journey⁠ Part 1 of this series: ⁠Causality and Conditionality⁠ Clerestory by ⁠⁠Bryan Kam⁠⁠ • Infrequent updates at ⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠ • All my work plus exclusive content at ⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠ Show notes https://pod.fo/e/171350

Part 4 in a series of interviews on the book I'm working on, Neither/Nor. In this episode, ⁠Isabela Granic⁠ and I discuss how AI technologies like ChatGPT relate to experience. We move into Schopenhauer's distinction between rationality and the intuition in The World as Will and Representation. Topics discussed: Previous podcast episode: ⁠The AI and Dark Forest, with Maggie Appleton⁠ The explicit versus implicit in text Philosophy is about changing your mind and life Opportunity costs of reading Brian Magee article on clarity in philosophical texts: Sense and Nonsense My thread on Shklovsky and defamiliarization Tolstoy's Hadji Murat My thread on Janus words, Freud's (un)heimlich Richard Wilhelm's I Ching Graham: Zhuangzi's reaction against logic for ends in life (as opposed to means): aphorism, example, parable, and poetry We'll come back to mathematics at some point We'll come back to language models as averages Dependent Origination article Previous episodes: Part 3 of this series: AI and Pyrrhonism Part 2 of this series: ⁠A Philosophical Journey Part 1 of this series: Causality and Conditionality Clerestory by ⁠Bryan Kam⁠ • Infrequent updates at ⁠Substack⁠ • All my work plus exclusive content at ⁠Patreon⁠ Show notes https://pod.fo/e/16f7ac

Part 3 in a series of interviews on the book I'm working on, Neither/Nor. In this episode, Isabela Granic and I discuss how AI technologies like ChatGPT relate to living textual traditions. We then move into Socrates vs Zhuangzi, and the Pyrrhonist "middle way" between dogmatism and nihilism. Topics discussed: Previous podcast episode: The AI and Dark Forest, with Maggie Appleton The relationship of textual traditions to their oral traditions and central texts The Socratic method versus Zhuangzi's "illumination" Pyrrho of Elis and Sextus Empiricus Part 2 of this series: A Philosophical Journey, with Isabela Granic Clerestory by Bryan Kam • Infrequent updates at Substack • All my work plus exclusive content at Patreon Show notes https://bit.ly/3J50vEG

In this episode I spoke to my friend Joachim Brackx in a series of voicenotes, recorded over a period of a few weeks at the end of last year. See more about Joachim (and hear his mellifluous podcast!) at Relating to Self. This episode is an experiment in epistolary podcasting 😊 Over the course of the pandemic I got to know people from the internet quite well through voicenotes. These were sent asynchronously to overcome timezone and calendar fatigue. In this episode, Joachim and I alternated messages with different lengths:  1 minute, then 2, 4, and 8 minutes. Clerestory by Bryan Kam • Infrequent updates at Substack • All my work plus exclusive content at Patreon

In this episode I speak to Rob Knight about approaches to meditation. We discuss the Buddhist traditions, how dependent origination relates to emptiness, cognitive science, and the problem of universals in philosophy. I speak about the ideas in  Neither/Nor, the book I'm writing, and the two complimentary modes required to understand and interact with the world. My website. Occasional updates on my Substack. Frequent updates on my Patreon. See also the InterIntellect for events.

Part 2 in a series of interviews on the book I'm working on, Neither/Nor. Isabela Granic and I recap dependent origination and discuss how I encountered philosophy through Russian literature, Taoism, and eventually got interested in Western philosophy. My article: "Dependent Origination without any Pali" "The Disarticulation of the Self in Nietzsche" (1981) by J. Hillis Miller PDF Brian Magee article on philosophy: "Sense and nonsense" (2000) Our earlier episode: Experimental and Historical Sciences Article by Deborah Casewell: "Karl Jaspers: The forgotten father of existentialism" (2023) My website. Occasional updates on my Substack. Frequent updates on my Patreon. See also the InterIntellect for events.