Clerestory (Bryan Kam)

Clerestory (Bryan Kam)

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Clerestory (Bryan Kam) episodes

  • 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

      1 hr 19 min
    • 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:

        • 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

          55 min
        • 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 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

              1 hr 4 min
            • 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:

              • 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

                1 hr
              • 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

                31 min
              • 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.

                2 hr 13 min
              • 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 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.

                  1 hr 16 min
                • 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.

                  32 min
                • 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.
                    • 1 hr 34 min
                  • 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.

                    1 hr 18 min

                  About Clerestory (Bryan Kam)

                  From the publisher's feed

                  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…