Clerestory (Bryan Kam)

I’m Bryan Kam. I endeavour daily to make philosophy accessible and relevant. To that end I write this newsletter and host a podcast called Clerestory. I’m also writing a book called Neither/Nor and I’m a founding member of Liminal Learning. In London, I host a book club, a writing group, and other events. My work looks at how abstract concepts relate to embodied life, and how to use this understanding to transform experience.

Recently, I had a conversation with Haneen Khan, a sex coach and fellow thinker, about the relationship between abstract thinking and embodied experience.

The Nature of Abstraction and Experience

We began by discussing the academic paper which Isabela Granic and I recently submitted, which describes my philosophy Neither/Nor. The paper and the forthcoming book focus on the relationship between experience and abstraction, or theory and practice. The paper critiques what we term “latent Platonism,” an unconscious tendency to prioritize abstract, theoretical constructs over direct, embodied experience. This can reveal itself in conversation, for example, when sharing about an uncomfortable experience can lead an interlocutor to leap to broad generalizations rather than discussing the experience itself.

The Need for Balance and Awareness

Throughout our conversation, we emphasized the importance of balancing abstract reasoning with experiential knowledge. Haneen and I agree that awareness is key — awareness of when we're gravitating too heavily towards abstraction at the expense of our felt experiences (or, less frequently, vice versa).

Haneen shared valuable insights from her coaching practice, emphasizing the power of grounding practices that help individuals reconnect with their bodies and emotions. This balance, or oscillation as we’ve termed it, is crucial for a holistic understanding of the self.

Abstraction, while powerful, can become a tool of escapism or avoidance if unanchored by embodied awareness. Maintaining a strong connection to one’s felt experience, on the other hand, can enrich not only personal wellbeing but also interpersonal interactions.

Integration: A Path Forward

We concluded by emphasizing integration — a synthesis of experiential and conceptual wisdom — as a winding path forward. This integration offers a potential solution to the pitfalls inherent in each mode of understanding when pursued in isolation. Concepts like Internal Family Systems Therapy illustrate such an integration, offering a framework where conceptual understanding aids emotional and physical awareness.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences on this topic: How do you navigate the balance between abstraction and experience in your daily life? Let me know in the comments.

Bryan

P.S. If this conversation resonated with you, please share it with someone who might benefit from it. Please also like it, subscribe, or support me on Patreon or Ko-Fi!

A photo, not by me, of the place where we recorded the podcast, including the “fake grass” I mention

My friend ⁠Pen⁠ interviewed me about Type 1 Diabetes, which I've lived with for 38 years.

This is the second episode, in which we focus on my current daily experience living with diabetes. We also discuss how the intensity of managing diabetes relates to the book I'm writing, Neither/Nor, which explores the nuances between conceptual understanding and lived experience. I emphasize the need for a balance between experiential and conceptual knowledge, drawing from my own life to illustrate how these realms relate.

The first episode, in which we covered early diagnosis, is available here.

Clerestory by Bryan Kam • Writing on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ • Support this podcast at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

My friend Pen interviewed me about Type 1 Diabetes, which I've lived with for 38 years. In this podcast we speak about what diabetes is, and what what it's like to live with.

Clerestory by Bryan Kam • Writing on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ • Support this podcast at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

I spoke to director, cinematographer, and my good friend Cécile Embleton (instagram) about her work and influences and 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 the challenges and joys of making arthouse cinema.

It is also playing at Camden International Film Festival, in Camden, Maine, on Friday 13th September, 1pm @ Journey’s End Cinema.

Other films/shows we mentioned:

• Nomadland
• The Taste of Things
• Godland
• Silent Light
• Sátántangó
• The Turin Horse
• The Act of Killing
• Drive
• Only God Forgives
• The Neon Demon
• Too Old to Die Young
• Copenhagen Cowboy

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 of nature, and the role of embodied experience in facilitating ecological regeneration.

Clerestory by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bryan Kam⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ • Writing on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ • Support me at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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.

Recorded in June 2024.

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 Kam⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ • Infrequent updates at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ • All my work plus exclusive content at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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, including the differences in the organizing assumptions of Eastern and Western approaches to philosophy.

Clerestory by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bryan Kam⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ • Infrequent updates at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ • All my work plus exclusive content at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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 Speculative Discord
• Philosophy Telegram channel: The Underground University

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 response, meaning that one person would ask a question, and receive over an hour of perspectives.

Over two months this WhatsApp group supported each other through the trials and tribulations of the holiday period, finishing a documentary film, the meaning of intuition, seasonality, the struggle to re-engage with work, and more.

This episode of Clerestory contains an audio call with seven of the eight participants.

Clerestory by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bryan Kam⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ • Infrequent updates at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ • All my work plus exclusive content at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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 response, meaning that one person would ask a question, and receive over an hour of perspectives.

Over two months this WhatsApp group supported each other through the trials and tribulations of the holiday period, finishing a documentary film, the meaning of intuition, seasonality, the struggle to re-engage with work, and more.

This episode of Clerestory contains asynchronous voicenote reflections from seven of the eight participants on how the experience went.

Stay tuned for an article describing how to set up such a group for yourself, and another synchronous conversation from the participants.

Clerestory by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bryan Kam⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ • Infrequent updates at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ • All my work plus exclusive content at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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 Ideological State Apparatuses" (1975)
• A review of Kuhn's Last Writings in the LRB.

Previous episodes:

• Part 7 of this series: Jaynes, Tolstoy, Zhuangzi
• Part 6 of this series: ⁠Mental Proliferation⁠
• Part 5 of this series: ⁠⁠Crises and Revolutions⁠⁠
• 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

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 Proliferation
• Part 5 of this series: ⁠Crises and Revolutions⁠
• 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

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

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 • Infrequent updates at ⁠⁠⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠ • All my work plus exclusive content at ⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠

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://bryankam.com/record⁠⁠⁠⁠.

I will release episodes from responses I receive, aiming for 45 minute episodes after the initial "pilot."

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
• Historicization of translations
• How to deconstruct terms
• Comparing conceptual evolution with biological evolution
• Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer on definitions
• The two directions of dependent origination
• How and when to do conceptual genealogies like Nietzsche
• Metaphors as newly coined versus worn-out coins
• The increasing abstraction of the past few thousand years
• Mental proliferation within a single mind
• The resistance to abstraction by those who don't live in the built environment (Luria)
• Individualism in Montaigne and Fichte
• The issue of "obviousnesses" in Althusser's Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

Previous episodes:

• Part 5 of this series: Crises and Revolutions
• 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

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 Purpose.

Subscribe to Joachim's newsletter at ⁠Relating to Self⁠ and hear more on his podcast here.

Clerestory by ⁠⁠Bryan Kam⁠⁠ • Infrequent updates at ⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠ • All my work plus exclusive content at ⁠⁠Patreon⁠

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 responses I receive, aiming for 45 minute episodes after the initial "pilot."

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 receive, aiming for 30-45 minute episodes after the initial "pilot."

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 in Buddihism and General Systems Theory, Peter M. Senge: The Fifth Discipline, Donella Meadows: Thinking in Systems.

Recorded 2022-11-17.

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 at the start but they clear up as the podcast continues.

I'm @bryankam on Twitter. Click here to schedule a discussion with me.

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 Take Smart Notes led me to build my own knowledge management system, an implementation of Zettelkasten. We also discuss how software development relates to knowledge usage, metasystems, pragmatism, the problem of never revisiting notes, and how to decide what to remember, Schopenhauer, how note-taking relates to photo-taking.

Errata: I said that Schopenhauer is quoting "Owen Smith"; I'm thinking of Sir William Jones (1764–1794).

Schedule a Twitter space with me!

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, when we were getting set up, but otherwise it includes the entire conversation.

If you would like to schedule a conversation with me like this, please click here.

• 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 of the universal to the particular; see this Twitter thread.
• I refer to The Master & His Emissary, by Iain McGilchrist (2009), as well as The Problem of Knowledge, by Ernst Cassirer (1950), Conversations with Goethe (1836–1848).
• I also refer to Being You, by Anil Seth (2021).
• At the end, I read "Love Constant Beyond Death" (1648), by Francisco de Quevado, translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
• Historiansplaining podcast and the upcoming Twitter Space I'm holding with Sam Biagetti.

• 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 recording a clip to send to this podcast (click the +Message button).

• 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)
• Shakespeare: Sonnet 95

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.