Clerestory (Bryan Kam)

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: @[email protected].

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.

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.

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 complexity.

Also mentioned: Darwin, Lyell, Spinoza, Geertz, Tolstoy, Orwell, Shakespeare, Tanya Luhrmann, David Graeber, Jacques Elull, Viktor Shklovsky, Draper & White, Thomas Kuhn, John McPhee, Andrea Wulf, Daniel Kehlmann, William Whewell, and Lev Shestov 😅

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!