I spoke to director, cinematographer, and my good friend Cécile Embleton (instagram) about her new film ⁠Mother Vera⁠, which is playing at the London Film Festival next month. This is a feature documentary about the life of a young orthodox nun from Belarus, I have seen it, and it is spectacular. Cécile and I discuss literature, her influences, and…

This is a cross-post from my friend David Valerio's new podcast, Discern Earth. In it, we speak about what nature is. Here's David's description: We discuss the etymology of nature and related terms, whether there is a hard distinction between man and nature, hypostatization and reification, the Christian roots of theories about the inherent value …

Delia and I walked along the ⁠Parkland Walk⁠ in London with Zoom f2 recorders and lapel mics. We cover a bit about ⁠Neither/Nor⁠, as well as existentialism versus essentialism. The biologists I couldn't think of at the end was ecologist Robert MacArthur; see ⁠r/K selection theory⁠. Listen to Delia's podcast, ⁠Growing Up with Delia Burgess⁠. Recorde…

In this episode I spoke to Dr. Noah Martin, Director of the College of Modern Anxiety. We discussed the relationship between phenomenology and existentialism, and the relationship between subjective and objective understanding in philosophy. We cover thinkers like Edmund Husserl, Donna Haraway, Sartre, and de Beauvoir. Clerestory by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bryan K…

I spoke to Kit Tempest-Walters about his new book: Plotinus on Eternity and Time, which includes a translation and commentary of Ennead III.7. We discuss the challenges of translating, philosophical perspectives on the self, consciousness, and mysticism. We also talked about some of my perspectives from the book I'm writing, ⁠Neither/Nor⁠, includin…

It's been nearly a year since our ⁠last episode⁠, in which Maggie Appleton and I discussed why we write. A year is a long time in AI; has it made much progress in how it writes? Possibly not, but it has made some progress in search. Discussed: Search engines Perplexity and Exa Excellent IFS therapy app Refract.space Philosophy Discord: The Speculat…

At the end of 2023, I asked seven people I knew to join me in a WhatsApp group experiment. Read more ⁠here⁠. We set up a schedule by which one of us, each Thursday, would record a (suggested) 5 minute question on a creative or existential quandary we were facing. The other seven members had committed to responding with a (suggested) 10 minute respo…

At the end of 2023, I asked seven people I knew to join me in a WhatsApp group experiment. Read more here. We set up a schedule by which one of us, each Thursday, would record a (suggested) 5 minute question on a creative or existential quandary we were facing. The other seven members had committed to responding with a (suggested) 10 minute respons…

Part 8 in a series of interviews on the book I'm working on, ⁠⁠Neither/Nor⁠⁠. In this episode, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Isabela Granic⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and I discuss: Julian Jaynes The Aphoristic style of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Jaynes, and others The Axial Age and whether it changed human cognition ad experience Obviousnesses and ideology, from Althusser's "Ideology and Ideolog…

Part 7 in a series of interviews on the book I'm working on, ⁠Neither/Nor⁠. In this episode, ⁠⁠⁠⁠Isabela Granic⁠⁠⁠⁠ asks about three thinkers that have influenced my thinking: Julian Jaynes (1920–1997), Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), and Zhuangzi (369–286 BC) sometimes written Zhuang Zhou or Chuang-tzǔ). Previous episodes: Part 6 of this series: Mental P…

How do you balance your life’s purpose, your creative impulse, or your art, with the realities of life? Here are the final four responses I received. Thanks to Peter, Olga Yakimenko, Rainbow, and Kevin Bowers. Clerestory by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bryan Kam⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ • Infrequent updates at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ • All my work plus exclusive content at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠…

Principles of Neither/Nor: Every idea, concept, philosophy has a history The two opposed but complementary ways of knowing are intuition and reason Neither/Nor emphasizes dynamic movement across these two polarities and across all polarities, and opposes static positions Learning and perception involve experimentation, trial and error, variation an…

How do you balance your life’s purpose, your creative impulse, or your art, with the realities of life? Here are the next seven responses I've received. Thanks to Shannon, Luiz, Matt Sterett, and Yulia Babanova. I'm still taking submissions. Please upload your audio response here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bryankam.com/record⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Clerestory by ⁠⁠⁠⁠Bryan Kam⁠⁠…

How do you balance your life’s purpose, your creative impulse, or your art, with the realities of life? Here are the next seven responses I've received. Thanks to ⁠Patricia⁠, ⁠Liv⁠, ⁠Ben⁠, ⁠Nastasia⁠ (⁠@Gryphire⁠), ⁠Michael⁠, ⁠Maggie⁠ (⁠@Mappletons⁠), and Gloria. I'm still taking submissions. Please upload your audio response here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://brya…

Part 6 in a series of interviews on the book I'm working on, Neither/Nor. In this episode, ⁠⁠⁠Isabela Granic⁠⁠⁠ asks about the Buddhist term "papança" and how it relates to anxiety and depression. Topics discussed: The meaning of papança or ⁠Conceptual proliferation⁠ Whether this proliferation is related to rumination, anxiety, and depression Histo…

In this episode I spoke with my dear friend ⁠Joachim Brackx⁠ in a series of voicenotes. We discuss beauty, quality, and aesthetic enjoyment. We recorded the voicenotes over about a month, March–April 2023. We would both love to hear what you think of this experiment! This is a follow-up to our original epistolary experiment, on Choice, Desire, and …

How do you balance your life’s purpose, your creative impulse, or your art, with the realities of life? Here are the next five responses I've received. Thanks to Caleb, Delia, Samantha, Carolina, and Jacqueline. I'm still taking submissions. Please upload your audio response here: ⁠⁠⁠https://bryankam.com/record⁠⁠⁠. I will release episodes from resp…

How do you balance your life’s purpose, your creative impulse, or your art, with the realities of life? Here are the next four responses I've received. Thanks to Adam, Isabela, ⁠Gareth, and Catherine. I'm still taking submissions. Please upload your audio response here: ⁠⁠https://bryankam.com/record⁠⁠. I will release episodes from responses I recei…

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 episo…

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 …

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…

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 calle…

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 Ju…

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 an…

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 D…

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 …

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 wi…

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 Nietzsch…

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 U…

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 "idiogr…

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 B…

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 a…

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…

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 com…

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

I had a great conversation with Malcolm Ocean, founder of Complice, an intentionality app that I have used fruitfully since early 2018. Mentioned in this podcast: Malcolm's thread on "intentionality, not productivity" and this post on the same topic. My article "Dependent Origination without any Pali." Also mentioned: Joanna Macy: Mutual Causality …

This is a discussion from 3 July 2022, with Isabela Granic. We discuss GEMH Lab, dichotomies, Chinese brushpainting, uncertainty and Keats' negative capability, Per Bak, and theory versus practice. I'm @bryankam on Twitter. Click here to schedule a discussion with me.

On 2 July 2022, I hosted this conversation with Sam Biagetti of the excellent Historiansplaining podcast. We discussed Sam's interest in geography and history, his process for his rapid pace of putting out podcasts, the tremendous demand for learning on the internet, the magic of film, Nietzsche, Judaism, and Orientalism. I have some audio issues a…

This is a conversation about personal knowledge management that I had with Achim Rothe on 22 June, 2022. We discuss tags, folders, and searching. Schedule a Twitter space with me!

This is a live conversation I recorded on Twitter Spaces on 16 June 2022, between me (Bryan Kam) and Achim Rothe. We discuss our history of note-taking, our usage of personal knowledge management, and tools for thought. Achim discusses how he came to build Trickle.app, and I discuss how David Allen's Getting Things Done and Sönke Ahrens' How to Tak…

This is a live conversation I recorded on Twitter Spaces on 11 January 2022, between me (Bryan Kam), Isabela Granic, Athenian Stranger, and others. We discuss abstraction and perfection, including Spinoza's Ethics, Charles Sanders Peirce, the medieval scholastics, as well as Ancient Chinese, and Greek philosophy. I edited out the very beginning, wh…

This episode is about the universal versus the particular, in film, poetry and prose. There's a new thing, which is that you can now read this episode's transcript! In this episode, I discuss the Wenders film Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin, 1987). (Wenders' Q&A should be posted on the BFI YouTube channel.) I also consider the relationship …

From the blog: What I'm up to now. Listen to my first conversation with Achim Rothe (2022-06-16). Listen to my second conversation with Achim Rothe (2022-06-22). Read my announcement for my discussion with Sam Biagetti. Listen to my conversation with Sam Biagetti (2022-07-02). Please schedule a conversation with me (limited time only!). Or consider…

Mermillod et al.: The Stability-Plasticity Dilemma (2013) Erik Hoel: The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization (2021) Carhart-Harris et al.: The Entropic Brain (2014) Von Neumann: The Computer and the Brain (1957) Shakespeare: Sonnet 122

R. J. Hollingdale's 1994 translation of Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human (1878) My piece on the avant-garde Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Boyce: Why Some Children Are Orchids and Others Are Dandelions (2019) A. C. Graham: Disputers of the Tao (1989) Quanta: Out-of-Sync ‘Loners’ May Secretly Protect Orderly Swarms (2020) Shake…

In this episode I give Kuhn's 1973 lecture "Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice" (1973). There is a PDF of the lecture here. The book he discusses is The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I found the clip of Kuhn speaking on a closely related topic in this clip from 1995.

W. B. Yeats: All Things Can Tempt Me. Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962 book). Thomas Kuhn: "Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice" (1973 lecture) PDF.

Viktor Shklovsky and Russian Formalism (wikipedia), and Defamiliarization/ostrananie. My Twitter thread on Shklovsky. Alexandra Berlina's Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader. LA Review of Books: Both a Fish and an Ichthyologist. Professor Caryl Emerson. "Art as Device" (1917/1919. Sometimes translated as "Art as Technique"): PDF, including commentary on tra…

Norbert Elias: The Civilizing Process (1939). Richard Wrangham: Two types of aggression in human evolution (2018). Louis Althusser: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1970). My thread on Thomas Kuhn. Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Stanford Encyclopedia: Scientific Revolutions (2017). Thomas Hardy: At Castle Bo…