Basin & Range/The Air Plant
John McPhee: Annals of the Former World (1998). Emma Darwin: This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin (2019). Indrė Žliobaitė: On the nature of time information in the fossil record (2020). Charles...
View ArticleTao Te Ching/Chuang Tzu/Keats
The Tao Te Ching, translated by Derek Lin and Stephen Addiss/Stanley Lombardo A. C. Graham: Chuang-tzǔ: The Inner Chapters Harold D. Roth: A Companion to Angus C. Graham's Chuang Tzu John Keats: "When...
View ArticleAlthusser/Hardy's At Castle Boterel
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...
View ArticleShklovsky/Little Gidding
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...
View ArticleKuhn interstitial/Yeats' All Things Can Tempt Me
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. --- Send in a...
View ArticleThomas Kuhn Lecture: Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice (1973)
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....
View ArticleNietzsche's Human, All Too Human, Kuhn, A. C. Graham/Sonnet 95
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...
View ArticleThe Stability-Plasticity Dilemma/Sonnet 122
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:...
View ArticleIntention to resume
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...
View ArticleWings of Desire/Love Constant Beyond Death
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...
View ArticleAgainst Teleology and Abstraction
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...
View ArticleWhy We Take Notes, with Achim Rothe
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...
View ArticleLinking Knowledge, with Achim Rothe
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! --- Send in a voice...
View ArticleInterview with Sam Biagetti of Historiansplaining
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...
View ArticleDichotomies and Taoism, with Isabela Granic
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...
View ArticleMeditation, Attention, and Intentionality with Malcolm Ocean
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,...
View ArticleFilm, beauty, and iridescence
We discuss Powell & Pressburger films, Wings of Desire which I recorded an episode on, Tolstoy, beauty, iridescence, philosophy, and more. --- Send in a voice message:...
View ArticleA Conversation with David Valerio
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...
View ArticleA Discussion of Metaphor
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,...
View ArticleCausality and Conditionality with Isabela Granic
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...
View ArticleTruth and Emptiness with Jake Orthwein
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...
View ArticleThe Dark Forest and Generative AI with Maggie Appleton
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...
View ArticleHistory versus Physics, with Isabela Granic and Sam Biagetti
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...
View ArticleInterIntellect Fellowship and What I'm Reading
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,...
View ArticleA philosophical journey, with Isabela Granic
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,...
View ArticleMeditation paths, with Rob Knight
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...
View ArticleEpistolary: Joachim Brackx on Choice, desire, and purpose
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!)...
View ArticleAI and Pyrrhonism, with Isabela Granic
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...
View ArticleLanguage and Experience, with Isabela Granic
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...
View ArticleCrises and revolutions, with Isabela Granic
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...
View ArticleWhy We Write and Language Models with Maggie Appleton
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...
View ArticleEpistolary: Recourse to the Divine, with Eyal Shay
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...
View ArticleMeaningful Living vs Making a Living
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...
View ArticleEpistolary: Meaningful Living vs Making a Living (Part 1)
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),...
View ArticleEpistolary: Meaningful Living vs Making a Living (Part 2)
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....
View ArticleEpistolary: Meaningful Living vs Making a Living (Part 3)
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...
View ArticleEpistolary: Joachim Brackx on Beauty
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...
View ArticleMental Proliferation, with Isabela Granic
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....
View ArticleEpistolary: Meaningful Living vs Making a Living (Part 4)
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...
View ArticleEpistolary: Meaningful Living vs Making a Living (Part 5)
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...
View ArticleNeither/Nor Principles
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...
View ArticleEpistolary: Meaningful Living vs Making a Living (Part 6)
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...
View ArticleJaynes, Tolstoy, and Zhuangzi, with Isabela Granic
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...
View ArticleHas the Human Experience Changed? with Isabela Granic
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,...
View ArticleCreative Quandary Clinic, Part 1
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...
View ArticleCreative Quandary Clinic, Part 2
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...
View ArticleWriting and AI with Maggie Appleton
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...
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