Clerestory (Bryan Kam)

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.

I was awarded an InterIntellect fellowship! See the announcement here. In this episode, I speak in the Wood about what I'm interested in and why. This includes Pyrrhonism, Buddhism, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hume, Peirce, Kuhn, Jaynes, McGilchrist, and more. I will post the Rob Knight podcast soon! I mentioned my friend's podcast: Growing Up with Delia Burgess. Occasional updates on my Substack. Frequent updates on my Patreon. See also the InterIntellect for events.

I'm joined by developmental psychologist Isabela Granic and historian Sam Biagetti to discuss the differences between how reasoning is used in experimental sciences versus historical sciences. How do we get certainty from physics experiments? How do we get certainty about what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs? What do "nomothetic" and "idiographic" mean? We continue on from the discussion in Causality and Conditionality. We also make reference to an earlier discussion ("There's only two disciplines: history and physics") I had with Sam on this podcast. We rely on two papers by Carol Cleland: The long one: "Methodological and Epistemic Differences between Historical Science and Experimental Science" (2002): PDF. The short one: "Historical science, experimental science, and the scientific method" (2001): PDF.

We discuss Maggie's recent article The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI, and other issues related to generative models, machine learning, ChatGPT, and more! Also mentioned: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off. Please consider supporting my ongoing work on Patreon.

I loved having this conversation with Jake. In it, we discuss Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism, Pyrrhonism, pragmatism, and different theories of truth. Stay tuned for more! Read Jake's thread on Darwin's new type of scientific theory. Follow @JakeOrthwein or @bryankam on Twitter, or follow me on Mastodon: @bryankam@writing.exchange. Clerestory by Bryan Kam • Infrequent updates at Substack • All my work plus exclusive content at Patreon

Part 1 in a series of interviews on the book I'm working on, Neither/Nor. In this episode, Isabela Granic, professor of developmental psychology, interviews me on the question of causality. We discuss the difference between causality and the Buddhist understanding of conditionality, which I wrote about in my article "Dependent origination without any Pali." This is practical technique for ending suffering in every day life, but I will argue that it has consequences for scientific insights as well. In this episode we also cover mental proliferation, rumination, anxiety and depression, as well as the question of whether meditation leads to detachment. Please consider supporting this ongoing work on Patreon.

A discussion of metaphor, compression, and perception, with my friend Olga. We recorded this on Twitter spaces, on 28 August 2022. People discussed: Marshall McLuhan, Julian Jaynes, Iain McGilchrist, Douglas Hofstadter, Heidegger, Barbara Ehrenreich, Freud, Nietzsche, Ivan Bilibin, Andrei Tarkovsky, Emile Durkheim, Thomas Kuhn, Lera Boroditsky, and of course Mark Johnson and George Lakoff.

David and I spoke on Twitter Spaces in July 2022. We discussed Eastern Catholic theology and its parallels with Buddhism. We discuss the origin of the word physis (from which "physics"), as well as the history of geology and anthropology, the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity, catastrophism vs uniformitarianism, and other topics in complexity. Also mentioned: Darwin, Lyell, Spinoza, Geertz, Tolstoy, Orwell, Shakespeare, Tanya Luhrmann, David Graeber, Jacques Elull, Viktor Shklovsky, Draper & White, Thomas Kuhn, John McPhee, Andrea Wulf, Daniel Kehlmann, William Whewell, and Lev Shestov 😅 Learn more about David here. Please consider supporting this ongoing work on Patreon.

We discuss Powell & Pressburger films, Wings of Desire which I recorded an episode on, Tolstoy, beauty, iridescence, philosophy, and more.