COW - the podcast

Me, Metaphor and Mind... What philosophy tells us about recent findings in the cognitive sciences and how it makes for an effective self help tool. How individual empowerment opens up freedom of choice and encourages dialogue. And ultimately what we should do about it. The question we could all benefit from answering.

Hi there, welcome to Cow - The Podcast episode 18. I've entitled it Wow! Spinoza. This week again short but hopefully sweet. I take another run at some of the ideas of contemporary Cognitive Science, making a personal connection with what it feels like to think, what it feels like to take on the ideas of enlightenment philosopher Spinoza, to understand them from our 21st Century framing and to feel a physical empathetic connection with them after they have been around for so many centuries. We are after all embodied selves. Perhaps it is time to make that part of our everyday rationale. Philosophy? Meh! So what does that feel like? You have to tune In. And here's why...

Hi there, welcome to Cow - The Podcast episode 18. I've entitled it Wow! Spinoza. This week again short but hopefully sweet. I take another run at some of the ideas of contemporary Cognitive Science, making a personal connection with what it feels like to think, what it feels like to take on the ideas of enlightenment philosopher Spinoza, to understand them from our 21st Century framing and to feel a physical empathetic connection with them after they have been around for so many centuries. We are after all embodied selves. Perhaps it is time to make that part of our everyday rationale. Philosophy? Meh! So what does that feel like? You have to tune In. And here's why...

This week, contrasting a position of enlightened rationalism, with findings of our contemporary cognitive sciences, we hear Ant Biggs describe a personal struggle to come to terms with the results of any philosophical quest if you are to stay "true to the truth".

What happens when you do find your cognitive landscape undermined, or challenged; When you find out that maybe you are not what you thought you were... let alone that things are not as they seem.

Where does anyone go from there, when it really sinks in?

This week - Narrative, What Narrative? The story of a personal philosophical quest to found a moral basis for society.

Through the eyes of Descartes and Hume, our world view is seen as failing to describe the conditions required for a moral framework. This leads to our current parallel zeitgeist of despair and denial as described by Nietzsche as the inevitable consequence of the Enlightenment project.

It is seen to prove itself nothing more than an alternative to the God we killed with Western Enlightenment, to religion, and both are likened to stories, similar to many others in the grand scheme of things. Economics, Environment, Capital.

It matters not if the stories are true, only that they provide social cohesion, through the twin evolutionary drivers of social group belonging and linguistic sophistication.

This episode introduces the idea that these stories are fundamental to the way we think, and to the way we behave, but also explains how they are at the beck and call of our use of language. And therefore each and every one of us.

There is hope in that we control the narrative.

We need only decide on what it must do for us.

The Social Contract is broken. The state can no longer uphold its side of the bargain. For deep state to maintain power, for the good of all, it must act. And the choice it faces comes down to being between coercion or the control of opinion. The latter power, to control mass behaviour and opinion comes with the ability to harvest and digest big data, with control of social media.

And there is a battle for that control. We experience it in the developing narrative that portrays social media as being responsible for our social problems; for extremism, social dislocation etc and the growing calls for a fix that will hold the access gateways responsible for their content, a thinly veiled attempt to retain power through censorship. And more dangerously extending to social engineering. The problem is that censorship and social engineering may not produce the results that we expect or even desire. And whilst social media may function efficiently as a mirror, we might be unwise to think that it will do well as a nanny! There is a solution and it's easy! We just need to grow up, and take responsibility for our own opinions, our own emotional roller coaster, and to cast aside rhetoric and manipulation. That way we can hold the kind of adult conversations we need to, and suitably scale to the global problems we face today. The work starts at home, and it starts now...

In this 14th episode of COW - The Podcast, Ant Biggs explores the links between Mainstream Politics, Media And Extremism in order to open up a discussion about the biology of xenophobia, and the development of effective approaches to censorship, social engineering and personal responsibility.

You are listening to episode 13 of COW - can of worms - the podcast. Ironically titled 7 Acts of Sickening Violence, Involving Puppies... click here or To What End, the battle for our attention. In this episode, Ant Biggs tells a personal journey of the world of AI, its development and its consequences. Tracing the ethical issues facing those who recognise the dangers of having our primary system of communication, that is the internet, in the hands of a sophisticated and manipulating monopoly and the problems faced by the likes of anyone, required to try and make a living through it. How does that work? Is it OK to be involved with the system? Do we have to follow the rules to compete, and how healthy is that? Is any level of complicity acceptable? And if so, So what is it?

New Worlds, Feeling Good and The Biology of Free Speech. Episode 12 of COW - The Podcast. How conversation, free speech and a close examination of our personal beliefs and behaviours may form the best anti-depressants yet. Against a crisis background of rising prescriptions for anti-depressant drugs, Ant Biggs uses personal experience to draw links between our beliefs and behaviours, our narrative landscape and our basic biological, billion year old selves and to draw the conclusion that personal fulfillment can be found through a philosophical examination of the dissonance that exists between us as individuals and us, as members of society. The benefits of having to address our uncomfortable gotos are explained and parallels drawn with the need to allow free speech rather than to hide our less admirable selves away. The dissonance once acknowledged allows us to enter into conversation that might allow us to begin to shape society in ways in which it might begin to work, as it should, for us, rather than as it does, against us. Out of the darkness, hope.

Ant Biggs explores the cognitive, narrative landscape; A human condition of unavoidable complicity, as both hacker and hacked is exposed. A landscape full of danger that appears to be at the same time both difficult to escape but also one in which individuals may still yet claim to be fully responsibility.

This is Episode 11 of COW - the podcast "Tracking The Brain Hack" in which as Yuval Noan Harari might say, the myths that frame our reality are revealed, the deep biological nature of our narrative landscape, the mechanisms that drive social adoption, evolution and extinction. The function of the individual in that dynamic process show how we have been glued together, how our abilities have been turned into superpowers and how we have risen to great heights. But we are more than static automata, simple products of our past. We are an ultimately adaptable species, able to switch from one narrative to another within a moment of evolutionary time.

Uniquely able to swap from niche to niche when required. The trick is to know when the narratives that bind us, are no longer relevant. And to know where these superpowers must take us...