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Clerestory (Bryan Kam)

Clerestory (Bryan Kam)

By Bryan Kam

A podcast on philosophy. I'm interested in the origins of complexity, suffering, and selfhood. I'm now lucky to have conversations with amazing people, mostly on Eastern/Western philosophy. Early episodes are my monologues (with prose followed by poetry).
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Intention to resume

Clerestory (Bryan Kam)Jun 21, 2022

00:00
06:49
Writing and AI with Maggie Appleton

Writing 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 has made some progress in search.

Discussed:

Apr 12, 202401:04:02
Creative Quandary Clinic, Part 2

Creative 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 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

Apr 06, 202401:09:35
Creative Quandary Clinic, Part 1

Creative 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 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

Mar 31, 202401:29:60
Has the Human Experience Changed? with Isabela Granic

Has 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, 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:

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

Show notes

Mar 19, 202401:11:09
Jaynes, Tolstoy, and Zhuangzi, with Isabela Granic

Jaynes, 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 (1920–1997), Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), and Zhuangzi (369–286 BC) sometimes written Zhuang Zhou or Chuang-tzǔ).

Previous episodes:

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

Show notes

Feb 02, 202401:02:22
Epistolary: Meaningful Living vs Making a Living (Part 6)
Jan 25, 202450:30
Neither/Nor Principles

Neither/Nor Principles

Principles of Neither/Nor:

  1. Every idea, concept, philosophy has a history
  2. The two opposed but complementary ways of knowing are intuition and reason
  3. Neither/Nor emphasizes dynamic movement across these two polarities and across all polarities, and opposes static positions
  4. Learning and perception involve experimentation, trial and error, variation and selection
  5. All philosophies and concepts are social
  6. Neither/Nor apprehends processes and relations rather than objects
  7. Everything worthwhile comes from perception or experience
Oct 25, 202306:42
Epistolary: Meaningful Living vs Making a Living (Part 5)
Jul 19, 202336:47
Epistolary: Meaningful Living vs Making a Living (Part 4)
Jun 12, 202356:43
Mental Proliferation, with Isabela Granic

Mental 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.

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:

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

Show notes

Jun 02, 202301:22:49
Epistolary: Joachim Brackx on Beauty

Epistolary: 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 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

May 30, 202346:34
Epistolary: Meaningful Living vs Making a Living (Part 3)
May 22, 202356:15
Epistolary: Meaningful Living vs Making a Living (Part 2)

Epistolary: 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.

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."

May 08, 202347:12
Epistolary: Meaningful Living vs Making a Living (Part 1)

Epistolary: 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), 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

Apr 28, 202301:07:32
Meaningful Living vs Making a Living
Apr 22, 202306:19
Epistolary: Recourse to the Divine, with Eyal Shay

Epistolary: 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 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

Apr 11, 202344:14
Why We Write and Language Models with Maggie Appleton

Why 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 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

Apr 05, 202301:18:11
Crises and revolutions, with Isabela Granic

Crises 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 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:

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

Show notes https://pod.fo/e/171350

Apr 02, 202354:27
Language and Experience, with Isabela Granic

Language 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 Schopenhauer's distinction between rationality and the intuition in The World as Will and Representation.

Topics discussed:

Previous episodes:

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

Show notes https://pod.fo/e/16f7ac

Mar 26, 202301:03:25
AI and Pyrrhonism, with Isabela Granic

AI 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 move into Socrates vs Zhuangzi, and the Pyrrhonist "middle way" between dogmatism and nihilism.

Topics discussed:

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

Show notes https://bit.ly/3J50vEG

Mar 09, 202359:51
Epistolary: Joachim Brackx on Choice, desire, and purpose

Epistolary: 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!) 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

Mar 07, 202330:44
Meditation paths, with Rob Knight

Meditation 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 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.

Mar 02, 202302:12:58
A philosophical journey, with Isabela Granic

A 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, and eventually got interested in Western philosophy.

My website. Occasional updates on my Substack. Frequent updates on my Patreon. See also the InterIntellect for events.

Mar 01, 202301:15:56
InterIntellect Fellowship and What I'm Reading

InterIntellect 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, 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.

Feb 13, 202331:52
History versus Physics, with Isabela Granic and Sam Biagetti

History 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 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.
Feb 09, 202301:33:13
The Dark Forest and Generative AI with Maggie Appleton

The 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 Lemons, and the Great Logging Off.

Please consider supporting my ongoing work on Patreon.

Feb 04, 202301:17:25
Truth and Emptiness with Jake Orthwein
Jan 30, 202301:52:29
Causality and Conditionality with Isabela Granic

Causality 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 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.

Jan 12, 202301:15:59
A Discussion of Metaphor

A 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, 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.

Jan 07, 202301:10:00
A Conversation with David Valerio
Dec 22, 202201:54:15
Film, beauty, and iridescence

Film, beauty, and iridescence

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

Dec 07, 202201:01:37
Meditation, Attention, and Intentionality with Malcolm Ocean

Meditation, 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, 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.

Nov 17, 202201:02:46
Dichotomies and Taoism, with Isabela Granic

Dichotomies 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 @bryankam on Twitter. Click here to schedule a discussion with me.

Nov 06, 202201:28:37
Interview with Sam Biagetti of Historiansplaining

Interview 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 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.

Oct 20, 202202:09:30
Linking Knowledge, with Achim Rothe
Sep 29, 202201:00:23
Why We Take Notes, with Achim Rothe

Why 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 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!

Sep 15, 202201:22:27
Against Teleology and Abstraction

Against 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 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.

Sep 01, 202202:02:19
Wings of Desire/Love Constant Beyond Death

Wings of Desire/Love Constant Beyond Death

Jun 30, 202229:24
Intention to resume
Jun 21, 202206:49
The Stability-Plasticity Dilemma/Sonnet 122
Jun 29, 202119:57
Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human, Kuhn, A. C. Graham/Sonnet 95
Jun 17, 202101:03:01
Thomas Kuhn Lecture: Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice (1973)
Jun 01, 202158:10
Kuhn interstitial/Yeats' All Things Can Tempt Me

Kuhn interstitial/Yeats' All Things Can Tempt Me

May 22, 202112:50
Shklovsky/Little Gidding

Shklovsky/Little Gidding

May 07, 202119:11
Althusser/Hardy's At Castle Boterel
Apr 27, 202128:09
Tao Te Ching/Chuang Tzu/Keats
Apr 20, 202128:24
Basin & Range/The Air Plant

Basin & Range/The Air Plant

I host salons at The Interintellect; my next one will be on collaboration and networked thought on 2021-04-28.

Thanks for listening and I'd love to hear from you. You can find me on twitter, on clubhouse, or at my website. My blog is here.

Thanks again to Patricia, Isabela, and JP :)

Apr 13, 202131:02