Friction

What if the deepest question about “you” isn’t whether you’re the same person over time, but which future life it’s actually rational for you to anticipate and care about as your survival?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Trenton Merricks is Commonwealth Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia, and his work focuses primarily on metaphysics, but also religion, epistemology, language and mind. In this interview, we discuss his book, "Self and Identity".

2. Book Summary

In Self and Identity, Trenton Merricks argues that a lot of debate about “personal identity” mixes together two different questions. The first is his What Question: what it is for a future person to have, at that future time, what matters in survival for you. His answer is that survival-relevance is constituted by what it’s appropriate for you to first-personally anticipate and to have future-directed self-interested concern about—where “appropriate” is a distinctive, non-evidential and non-moral norm. He also insists we shouldn’t conflate what matters in survival with what matters to you about the future in general (friends, projects, agency, etc.), since that conflation can distort arguments about survival.

The second is his Why Question: what relation to a future conscious person explains why that future person will have what matters in survival for you. Merricks’s headline view is: identity is not what matters in survival, but identity delivers what matters in survival—i.e., numerical identity is (on his favored endurance picture) the right kind of explanation for why survival obtains. He then defends both the sufficiency and the necessity of personal identity for survival, targeting Parfit-style fission reasoning in particular and arguing that (depending on one’s metaphysics of persistence) Parfit’s argument can be blocked; he also rejects the idea that unbranching psychological connectedness/continuity is sufficient for personal identity (and so for what matters in survival).

Chapters 4–6 then stress-test rival “psychological” answers to the Why Question—views that tie survival to having the same self (values/desires/projects), the same self-narrative, or forms of agential / narrative continuity—and Merricks argues these proposals mishandle cases of deep transformation (including being “turned” into someone evil in a way that seems bad for you without being merely like ceasing to exist). Finally, Chapter 7 applies the framework to personal immortality (“the hope of glory”): immortality is framed as there always being someone who will have what matters in survival for you, and Merricks uses his earlier claims to respond to familiar worries—e.g., that survival comes in degrees, or that immortality would inevitably be tedious.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:44 - Self and Identity

04:25 - What and why questions

07:25 - Semantics

12:29 - Normative issues

13:29 - What matters in survival

18:36 - Numerical identity

21:04 - More conditions?

22:42 - The past

24:35 - Permanent comatose

30:49 - Memory wipe

36:05 - Psychological continuity

37:25 - Puzzles of identity

40:47 - Persistence and eternalism

46:43 - Relative identity

53:42 - Sci-fi cases

58:17 - Other views

1:00:24 - Non-reductionism

1:05:51 - Examples

1:10:55 - Vagueness

1:14:37 - Narrative accounts

1:18:32 - Christian theology

1:25:03 - A puzzle

1:27:32 - Value of philosophy

1:29:25 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Can brains build consciousness? In this interview, Paul Thagard argues that they can, and explains his approach.

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Paul Thagard is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Association for Psychological Science. His work focuses on cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science and medicine.

Check out his book, "Dreams, Jokes, and Songs: How Brains Build Consciousness"!

https://academic.oup.com/book/60618https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FHQJ3KCS/

2. Book Summary

Paul Thagard’s Dreams, Jokes, and Songs: How Brains Build Consciousness develops a neuroscientifically grounded, mechanism-based theory meant to explain not just “ordinary” perception, sensation, emotion, and thought, but also the especially puzzling, highly structured forms of experience that show up in dreaming, humour, and music. The core proposal is the “NBC” theory: conscious experience arises from interactions among Neural representation, Binding, Coherence, and Competition—where coherence is understood as constraint satisfaction and competition governs which representations win out for attention and interpretation.

After laying out NBC and illustrating it with simpler cases (e.g., how brains build perceptual and bodily experiences and integrate them into unified “compound” consciousness), Thagard uses it to explain three marquee domains. Dreaming is treated as a product of the same mechanisms, aiming to explain why dreams are common, emotionally charged, continuous with daily life yet sometimes bizarre, and still feel intensely “what-it’s-like” (his term “zing”) even when they don’t make ordinary sense. Humour is explained via a characteristic dual shift: incoming words/images trigger an initial interpretation and emotional response, then a change prompts a second interpretation and response, and recognizing that shift yields surprise and laughter. Musical experience is explained as the brain binding basic note-representations into higher-order structures like melody, rhythm, and harmony, then binding these with other modalities (movement, words, visuals, emotion), with competition helping music “break through” into conscious attention.

The later chapters broaden the same framework to other conscious domains (e.g., religion, morality, sports performance, romance, and the effects of drugs), and argue that any full theory must handle time consciousness: the brain represents time using “time cells,” binds these into larger “memory units,” and uses coherence and competition to produce an experienced sense of duration and temporal flow. Thagard also evaluates animal consciousness and asks about machine consciousness, arguing that current large language models (including ChatGPT) can be impressive without having felt perceptions, sensations, or emotions, partly because they lack the kind of world- and body-involving understanding central to his story. Finally, he connects the theory to a broader mind–body view he calls “coherent materialism” (or “cohmaterialism”), on which genuinely minded systems are rare because they require tightly coupled hardware/software that coherently satisfies constraints of time, space, energy, and history.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:51 - Overview of book

04:57 - Qualia

08:12 - Illusionism

11:53 - Neural representation

14:58 - Representation

18:14 - Binding

22:40 - Coherence

26:58 - Emotions

28:49 - Competition

31:18 - Getting consciousness

38:13 - Emergence

40:27 - Additional mechanisms

42:50 - Correlates vs. identity

48:00 - Explanatory breadth

50:53 - Dreams

55:59 - Global workspace theory

58:27 - Other approaches

1:01:46 - Animal consciousness

1:05:41 - Vagueness

1:08:37 - Functionalism and AI

1:16:14 - Coherent materialism

1:18:37 - Thought experiments

1:22:30 - Mary's room

1:25:22 - Future research

1:27:57 - Value of philosophy

1:30:01 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

If we ever make first contact, the hard part might not be sending a message across space, but working out whether aliens do science in anything like our sense, share concepts like number and explanation, and could actually understand what we mean by “physics.”

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Daniel Whiteson is an experimental particle physicist and professor of Physics and Astronomy at University of California, Irvine. His work focuses on the analysis of high-energy particle collisions. He co-hosts a podcast about the Universe (Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe).

Check out his new book with Andy Warner, "Do Aliens Speak Physics?: And Other Questions about Science and the Nature of Reality"!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1324064641/

2. Book Summary

In Do Aliens Speak Physics? Daniel Whiteson (with Andy Warner) asks what it would take—not just to find intelligent aliens, but to have a meaningful scientific exchange with them. The organizing idea is an “extended Drake equation”: beyond the usual probabilities of life and intelligence, we have to ask what fraction of alien civilizations do something like experiment-driven science (fscience), what fraction of those we could communicate with at all (fcommunication), and then whether we’d even share enough conceptual overlap to ask and answer the “same” scientific questions.

The middle of the book is a tour of the ways those terms might collapse. Even if aliens are curious, their “science” might not look like ours; even if we can exchange signals, translating meanings could be brutally hard; and even math—often treated as the obvious shared language—might not function as a universal bridge if aliens don’t carve the world into countable objects the way we do. The authors use vivid hypotheticals to press the point that what feels “obvious” to us can hide deep assumptions (about counting, representation, and what matters), and those assumptions can reshape what we notice and what questions we even think to ask.

In the later chapters, they argue that—even granting shared questions—there’s no guarantee of the kind of grand, final alien “answer” we fantasize about. Human physics already looks like a patchwork of domain-specific approximations that don’t neatly sew into one overarching quilt, and there can be multiple incompatible “stories” that fit the same observed data, suggesting a Rashomon-style underdetermination that aliens might resolve differently (or not at all). The upbeat conclusion is that this isn’t just a downer about SETI: thinking through alien science is a way of spotting our own hidden commitments and keeping alternative conceptual paths alive—so the exercise teaches us about our science and our minds, even if no perfectly compatible alien colleagues ever show up.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:55 - Overview of book

04:29 - Illustrations

05:31 - Extended Drake equation

08:31 - Navigators

11:44 - Different physics

14:28 - Communication

21:25 - First contact

24:50 - Mathematics

29:33 - Vagueness

33:12 - Indispensability

35:57 - Ontology plus dynamics

39:21 - Arbitrary conventions

41:20 - Varieties of life

48:06 - Friendly?

49:16 - Common concepts

52:51 - Learning about ourselves

54:11 - Progress

1:00:03 - Value of philosophy

1:02:39 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Can a Bayesian look at fine-tuning make “design” less compelling, and do Grim Reaper-style infinity puzzles really show that an infinite past is impossible?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Graham Oppy is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, and specializes in Philosophy of Religion.

2. Interview Summary

In this interview, Friction speaks with Graham Oppy about two big clusters of issues: a Bayesian way of framing fine-tuning arguments, and how (if at all) Benardete/“Grim Reaper” style paradoxes support causal or temporal finitism. On fine-tuning, Friction sketches a strategy that starts from probabilistic constraints—roughly, that “design” shouldn’t get a higher prior than non-design, and that life-permittingness/fine-tuning isn’t (or needn’t be) more expected on design than on non-design—so that updating on a life-permitting universe won’t, by itself, drive you toward design. Oppy presses on how the hypothesis space is being carved up and what background assumptions are doing the work, noting that fine-tuning defenders often treat “design” as a family of more specific hypotheses—some of which might assign high likelihood to fine-tuning (the “more batter on the design side” idea). A related thread Oppy raises is an “inscrutability” worry: given a designer’s vast option space, it may be hard to say what fine-tuning should even be likely on design, which complicates the likelihood comparisons that fine-tuning arguments rely on. The conversation also touches on how conditioning on extremely specific facts about “these exact parameters” can generate counterintuitive results about what should have been expected a priori, and Oppy connects this to “many-gods” style worries familiar from Pascal’s Wager debates.

In the second half, Friction and Oppy turn to Benardete-style setups: infinite sequences of would-be interveners arranged at times approaching a limit, which can make it seem like an outcome must occur even though no particular intervener is ever the one who triggers it. Friction outlines a common finitist dialectic: if an infinite past/regress would allow a Grim Reaper scenario (often via a “patchwork” recombination principle), and if Grim Reaper scenarios are impossible, then infinite pasts/regresses are impossible too. Oppy focuses much of his skepticism on the linking step—especially the idea that you can “piece together” regions from different possible worlds to build the paradox—because the relevant dispositions and actions don’t obviously survive that kind of cut-and-paste. He also emphasizes that there are plenty of coherent infinite-sequence stories that don’t generate contradiction (he offers simple toggle-style examples), which undercuts the claim that infinity as such forces paradox. And a recurring diagnosis is that many paradox presentations under-specify what happens at the crucial infinite-limit case—so the sense of impossibility may come from an incomplete story rather than a genuine contradiction.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:18 - Bayesian fine-tuning argument

02:30 - Design vs. non-design hypotheses

03:52 - Two probability constraints

05:17 - Oppy’s first reaction

07:24 - Conditional probabilities questioned

10:11 - Does design predict life?

11:16 - Purely a priori reasoning

15:16 - Causation vs. design

16:36 - Probability

19:54 - Background

22:33 - Simplicity

27:41 - Skeptical theism and fine-tuning

28:22 - Life-permitting vs. fine-tuned

31:39 - Comparing specific hypotheses

37:55 - Simplicity and divine complexity

39:28 - Necessary beings and the universe

43:30 - Intuitions and priors

46:52 - Stalking-horse objection

49:52 - Background knowledge and updating

51:34 - Double-dipping concern

55:44 - Grim reapers

1:01:41 - Patchwork principle

1:10:54 - Thomson’s lamp analogy

1:14:33 - Toe-regrowing variant

1:22:12 - Lewis and patchwork

1:23:41 - Intrinsic powers

1:26:27 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What if Kant is right that real freedom is not doing whatever you feel like, but choosing principles you can rationally endorse and then living by them?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Karen Stohr is Ryan Family Chair Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Georgetown University, where she is also a Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. Her work focuses on ethics. In this interview, we focus on her book, "Choosing Freedom: A Kantian Guide to Life".

2. Book Summary

Karen Stohr’s Choosing Freedom is a practical guide to living “freely” in a Kantian sense: not doing whatever you feel like, but governing yourself by principles you can rationally stand behind. She emphasizes that the book is not about becoming more like Kant or constantly asking “What would Kant say?”; it’s about using Kant’s insights to illuminate hard-to-notice features of our moral lives and help you live by your own standards. Stohr also frames the book as a short tour of Kant’s systematic ethics followed by lots of attention to the everyday “trees” Kant actually wrote about—things like gossip, friendship, and dinner parties—because Kant meant ethics to guide real life. Kantian freedom, on this telling, often requires self-constraint: exercising autonomy means “getting a grip on ourselves” so we can live according to rationally defensible principles rather than being yanked around by impulse and procrastination.

The early chapters lay out the Kantian basics: morality is grounded in reason rather than shifting feelings, and the categorical imperative is presented through three connected ideals—equality, dignity, and community. Stohr stresses that Kant isn’t only about isolated individual choice: the “kingdom of ends” picture highlights how our communities shape our moral lives and how morality asks us to build social relations on the equal value of persons. In the “moral assessment” sections, she connects this framework to knowing and judging ourselves (and others), urging forms of charitable interpretation that keep us from using other people’s flaws as a way to feel superior, and redirecting attention back to our own moral work. Along the way, she squarely acknowledges Kant’s moral failures—especially racist and sexist views—while arguing that Kant’s own framework contains powerful resources against dehumanization, beginning with a strict duty to treat every human being with dignity.

Most of the book applies the theory to character, goals, and social life, organized into parts on vices, life goals, socializing, and looking forward. Stohr explains Kantian vices as “monsters” that live inside us and “enslave us from the inside,” warping our reasoning and making it harder to recognize and follow our duties—hence chapters on servility, arrogance, contempt, gossip/defamation, mockery, deceitfulness, and drunkenness. She then turns to constructive practices (self-improvement, resilience, reserve, beneficence, gratitude) and to the moral texture of friendship, love, manners, and even hosting: for Kant, good social rituals can cultivate both understanding and “fellow-feeling,” helping us practice respect in community. The final chapters emphasize hope as a duty-like orientation toward moral progress: we’re to work toward better ethical community (and even peace) by sustained effort, grounding optimism in the idea that people can keep trying to be better than they were yesterday.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Intro

00:43 - Overview of Choosing Freedom

03:03 - Making Kant accessible

06:08 - Everyday Kantian ethics

06:56 - Freedom and rationality

10:16 - Acting irrationally

12:39 - Human nature and evil

16:36 - Can evil be rational?

20:58 - The categorical imperative

21:44 - Universal law formulation

25:55 - Exceptions and universalization

30:48 - Humanity formulation

34:30 - Ends and dignity

37:44 - Kingdom of ends

41:38 - Perfect vs imperfect duties

46:29 - Conscience and moral assessment

51:55 - Reflecting on conscience

52:24 - Vices and virtues

53:06 - Duty not to lie

57:53 - Lies and omissions

1:00:14 - Civility and manners

1:02:59 - Moral improvement

1:06:39 - Teaching ethics

1:09:54 - Philosophy as practice

1:13:09 - Value of philosophy

1:16:34 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

If causation is not fundamental, what keeps reality from turning into chaos with things randomly popping into existence, and does the kalām’s claim that whatever begins to exist has a cause really explain the order we see?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Dan Linford is lecturer at Old Dominion University, Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies. His work focuses on physics and the philosophy of physics, philosophy of religion.

2. Interview Summary

In this interview, Dan Linford discusses his paper “Without microphysical causation, just anything cannot begin to exist just anywhere,” motivated in part by debates around the causal principle often associated with the kalām cosmological argument. He frames the core question as whether the order we observe in the universe really requires causation—specifically, whether “whatever begins to exist must have a cause”—or whether there are non-causal ways to explain why we don’t see arbitrary “raging tigers” popping into existence out of nowhere.

A major focus is a traditional line of support for the causal principle that Linford labels the Hobbes–Hume–Edwards–Pryor principle (HPP): roughly, if the causal principle were false, we’d lack a good explanation for why things don’t begin to exist at arbitrary times, places, in arbitrary numbers, and of arbitrary kinds. Linford and the host also pause on how strong the causal principle is supposed to be (mere accident vs physical/metaphysical necessity), and note that once you add extra metaphysical commitments (the interview uses the A-theory of time as an example), the principle can become either harder to justify or even vacuously true in a way that won’t do the work causal-principle defenders want.

Linford then develops an alternative picture—drawing on “neo-Russellian” themes—on which causation isn’t fundamental to microphysics (for Russell-style reasons like time-symmetry), but causal talk remains useful in the special sciences for identifying “effective strategies” (a Cartwright-inspired point about intervention vs mere correlation). The upshot is that even if microphysical causation fails, it doesn’t follow that “anything goes”: what can begin to exist is still constrained by nomic (law-based), metaphysical, and logical principles, and those constraints can underwrite explanations of why tigers (etc.) don’t pop into existence. He also addresses a familiar objection to Humean-style views—why expect an “ordered continuation” of the mosaic rather than chaos—by appealing to Lewis-style similarity/“closeness” considerations (and related constraints on probability talk), arguing that the standard HPP-based worry doesn’t straightforwardly land.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Intro

00:30 - Overview

04:40 - How strong is the causal principle?

10:15 - The Hobbes-Edwards-Prior (HEP) principle

16:20 - Expecting chaos vs. no explanation

20:35 - What if explanation just runs out?

23:37 - Neo-Russellianism

32:30 - Fundamental physics

36:13 - Time asymmetries in fundamental physics?

40:49 - The main challenge to Neo-Russellianism

44:23 - Do microphysical things "begin to exist"?

51:33 - Law-based explanations without causation

57:22 - Are laws more mysterious than causes?

1:03:41 - The Neo-Humean response

1:14:35 - Where does metaphysical explanation end?

1:17:37 - Theological connections and brute facts

1:21:45 - Final thoughts

1:22:14 - Value of philosophy

1:24:30 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What, if anything, happened before the Big Bang, which origin story is right, and what future observations could finally decide between them?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guests

Phil is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Socieity, science popularizer, and runs the excellent YouTube channel "Phil Halper", aka Skydivephil. Niayesh Afshordi is professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Waterloo. He is also a founding faculty member at the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics and an Associate Faculty in the Cosmology and Gravitation group at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

2. Book Summary

Battle of the Big Bang argues that what most people call “the Big Bang” is really two things: a well-tested story about a very hot early universe, and a much less secure story about an initial “bang” or singular beginning. The authors frame the hot early universe as “science’s earliest memory,” while emphasizing that cosmologists are now trying to recover an even earlier “lost memory,” using new physics rather than just extrapolating familiar laws backwards forever. They set the stage with a brisk history of cosmological thinking and with the central puzzle: the standard picture explains a lot about how the universe evolves, but it does not straightforwardly tell us what (if anything) happened before the Big Bang, or what replaces the would-be singularity.

The middle of the book is a guided tour through today’s rival “origin stories,” presented as a genuine competition with strengths, weaknesses, and lots of unfinished business. Using inflation and its offshoots as one major contender, the authors then explore a sequence of alternatives: multiverse ideas, Hawking-style “no boundary” beginnings, string-theoretic scenarios like colliding branes and string-gas phases, loop-quantum-gravity-inspired “big bounce” pictures, cyclic models, “born from a black hole” proposals, varying-speed-of-light approaches, holographic cosmology, and even self-creation/time-loop possibilities. A recurring theme is that the singularity is widely treated as a sign that our two great frameworks, quantum mechanics and general relativity, cannot both be straightforwardly applied at the earliest times, so any serious account has to confront quantum gravity head-on, even though there is no consensus (and sometimes “too many answers”) about what that looks like in detail.

In the final stretch, the book turns from “what might have happened” to “how could we ever know,” stressing the limits of what current headline instruments can actually tell us about the beginning. The authors note that even spectacular observatories like JWST are not designed to see back to the origin itself, and that the cosmic microwave background is the oldest light we can directly observe, so ordinary telescopes hit a hard wall; to probe earlier than that, we likely need new “messengers,” especially primordial gravitational waves, and better ways of squeezing evidence out of subtle imprints on the sky. They also reflect on the sociology of foundational disputes, warning that scientific consensus is not the same thing as popularity, and that the “battle” can sometimes resemble factional conflict more than dispassionate evaluation. The upshot is deliberately modest: nobody yet knows what happened at the Big Bang, but the path forward is clearer than it used to be, because future observations could rule whole classes of models in or out.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:54 - Impetus for the book

07:12 - Historical background

09:01 - The Big Bang

15:22 - The meaning of “nothing”

15:43 - Quantifier vs. noun sense of nothing

18:22 - Almost nothing scenarios

23:37 - How theories bear on cosmic origins

28:47 - Concerns about multiverse theories

29:10 - Testability of multiverse models

34:05 - String theory and brane theory

39:25 - Could there be time before time?

39:59 - Limits of temporal concepts

43:43 - Two-direction time models

50:05 - Other models

54:01 - Are we on the cusp of a new cosmic revolution?

1:01:31 - Favorite cosmological models

1:04:36 - Connections to theology and the Kalam

1:09:30 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What happens to our laws about pregnancy, parenthood, and abortion when “gestation” can be shared, transferred, or even moved outside the human body by new biotechnology?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Elizabeth Chloe Romanis is Associate Professor in Biolaw in the Durham Law School as well as in the Durham Centre for Ethics and Law in the Life Sciences, and her work focuses on healthcare law and bioethics.

Check out her book!

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/biotechnology-gestation-and-the-law-9780198873785

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0198873786

2. Book Summary

In Biotechnology, Gestation, and the Law, Elizabeth Chloe Romanis argues that debates about reproduction are often built on shaky concepts, and that this matters once new technologies make “ordinary” assumptions about pregnancy and birth start to wobble. A central move is to separate pregnancy (a state of being) from gestation (a generative process), and to show how legal thinking slides between incompatible pictures, sometimes implicitly treating the fetus as part of the pregnant person, but more often treating the pregnant person as a “container.” This conceptual work is not just metaphysical housekeeping: it exposes the background assumptions that structure current legal schemas and shape how people’s lives are regulated.

Building on that foundation, Romanis proposes treating “technologies enabling gestation” as a genus that includes surrogacy, uterus transplantation (UTx), and ectogestation, and she argues that the law’s focus on “assisted conception” is a poor fit for regulating this very different procreative enterprise. She then tracks how existing frameworks can blunt the technology’s transformative potential by trying to force new modalities of gestation to mimic “natural” procreation, a pattern tied to deeper forms of biological essentialism and a tendency to privilege the binary, two-parent nuclear family. On sex and gender, she argues that these technologies can be equality-enhancing for marginalized groups, but that it is a mistake to treat them as a simple “solution” for women’s equality; the more radical potential lies in “unsexing” generative labour and disrupting the assumption that gestation is inherently female.

Later chapters apply this framework to parenthood and abortion. Romanis examines why gestation has been used to anchor legal motherhood, and how that rationale becomes unstable once gestational work can be divided across people and machines (as in partial or complete ectogestation), creating new puzzles about who counts as a legal parent and when parental rights and responsibilities should begin. She emphasizes the importance of keeping clear boundaries that protect pregnant people, including carefully distinguishing entities undergoing extra-uterine gestation from fetuses, precisely to avoid expanding fetal-centred regulation of pregnancy. Finally, she argues that technologies enabling gestation do not change the morality of abortion when the harms of unwanted pregnancy are centred, but they are likely to generate politically motivated pressures on abortion provision because much ectogestation literature frames abortion as “the problem” rather than recognizing it as a response to unwanted pregnancy.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:03 - Overview

02:43 - Pregnancy vs. gestation

05:50 - Conceptual engineering

08:19 - Fetal relationship

13:13 - Legal metaphysics

14:43 - Gradual part-whole views

19:22 - Biotech and gestation

22:39 - Social and legal issues

25:59 - Uterus transplants

30:23 - Social narratives

36:44 - Biological essentialism

42:50 - Legal motherhood

49:03 - Biotech and abortion

58:53 - Abortion and metaphysics

01:01:04 - Reforming abortion law

01:11:36 - Value of philosophy

01:14:16 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What if the most important thing about acting together is not that our individual intentions line up, but that it can genuinely change how the world shows up to us through a first-person plural perspective?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Dan Zahavi is professor of philosophy and the director of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen and is editor-in-chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, with Shaun Gallagher. His work focuses on phenomenology, philosophy of mind and cognitive science.

Check out his book, "Being We: Phenomenological Contributions to Social Ontology"!

https://academic.oup.com/book/59446

https://www.amazon.com/dp/019289448X

2. Book Summary

Zahavi’s Being We argues that debates about ‘collective intentionality’ miss something central if they focus only on how individual intentions line up. The phenomenological tradition, he claims, forces us to take seriously the *qualitative* character of doing things together: feeling, thinking, and acting “as part of a we” can transform one’s sense of self, one’s relation to others, and one’s experience of the world. On this view, *we*-perspectives and *we*-experiences are not optional add-ons to an already complete theory of mind; they are genuine explananda that constrain what we can plausibly say about selfhood and social cognition.

In Part I (“We and I”), Zahavi tackles the “primacy” question: does the first-person plural precede the first-person singular, or vice versa? He argues that talk of a we requires plurality and differentiation, and that we-experiences presuppose (rather than erase) the self–other distinction; attempts to derive phenomenal consciousness or basic subjectivity from communal life don’t succeed. That doesn’t mean sociality is irrelevant to selfhood, but it does mean we need careful distinctions between cultural/conceptual accounts of the self and the minimal first-personal “for-me-ness” of experience—because an irreducible plurality of perspectives is exactly what makes distinctive forms of being-with possible in the first place.

Parts II and III then explain how we-ness is built up through concrete interpersonal relations and can take multiple forms. Zahavi emphasizes empathy and second-person engagement as ways of encountering another that preserve otherness while enabling coordination and mutual “contact,” and he distinguishes this from mere imaginative perspective-taking; this sets the stage for his analysis of shared emotions and why “affective sharing” needs clearer criteria than simple emotional contagion or matching feelings. Finally, he maps “varieties of we,” moving from intimate dyads and triads to thicker communal and national identifications: larger-scale wes are highly mediated, shaped by norms and institutions, and often sustained through “us–them” demarcation—sometimes actively orchestrated by political forces—so understanding we-formation also means understanding the risks of overly exclusive group identification.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:07 - Overview

04:12 - Phenomenology

10:29 - "I" and "we"

13:03 - Worry

17:12 - Individualist bias

25:33 - Semantic variance

27:13 - More empirical research

29:26 - Individual and social aspects

33:49 - Data

38:05 - Husserl

44:27 - Primacy

51:49 - Higher order theories of consciousness

59:40 - Vagueness

1:07:36 - Group membership

1:12:39 - Empathy

1:19:17 - Collective intentionality

1:23:00 - Technology

1:28:55 - Artificial intelligence

1:31:45 - Value of philosophy

1:35:05 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What are laws of nature, do they govern the universe or merely summarize it, and what do those answers imply about induction, chance, and time’s arrow?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Barry Loewer is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and the director of the Rutgers Center for Philosophy and the Sciences. In this interview, we explore philosophical issues related to laws of nature and related topics.

2. Interview Summary

Barry Loewer begins by situating the very idea of “laws of nature” historically: people have long noticed regularities, and often tied them to theology, but the modern notion of simple mathematical laws that describe motion and form the aim of physics really crystallizes in the 17th–18th centuries (especially in Descartes, influenced by Galileo). On that early picture, laws were not just descriptions but part of how God “governed” inert matter, since matter itself was taken to be passive. This historical backdrop sets up the interview’s central contrast between “governing” (non-Humean) and “systematizing” (Humean) conceptions of laws.

Loewer then develops the Humean line through David Lewis’s “best system” idea: take the total distribution of fundamental properties across spacetime, and the laws are whatever axioms best systematize it by balancing simplicity and informativeness. He contrasts this with Maudlin-style governance using a vivid joke: on the governing view, God sets initial conditions + laws and can “go on vacation,” whereas on the Humean view God would have to create the whole history “all at once,” and we later extract the best system from it. The conversation then turns to why many philosophers resist Humeanism: they want something to “hold the universe together,” and they worry that if laws are mere regularities then induction becomes unjustifiable; Loewer replies that Hume shows there’s no guarantee of induction anyway—science is inherently risky—and he brings in Goodman’s “grue” problem to show that even stating the induction problem correctly requires constraints on which predicates/generalizations count as projectible.

In the final stretch, the interview broadens into the metaphysical question behind Loewer’s book-title riff on Hawking: what “breathes fire into the equations,” i.e., why this universe and this lawlike structure at all—and what the world (and knowers like us) must be like for physics to succeed. Loewer suggests physics can’t itself answer “why there is a universe” or “why there are laws,” since any such explanation would already presuppose laws (a theological answer might be possible, but it wouldn’t be a scientific one). He then connects laws to chance and time via the Albert–Loewer “Mentaculus” program: add a “Past Hypothesis” that the universe began in a very low-entropy state, combine it with the dynamical laws and a Boltzmann-style probability measure, and you get a package that yields objective chances and explains time’s arrow—what he calls a “probability map of the universe.”

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:45 - Development of views about laws

15:15 - Two schools

26:37 - Popularity of non-Humean views

30:15 - Induction

38:15 - Further issues with induction

49:28 - What breathes fire into the equations?

1:01:25 - Background to the Mentaculus project

1:04:15 - Time

1:10:20 - Statistical mechanics

1:14:32 - Putting the Mentaculus package together

1:22:52 - Value of philosophy

1:35:57 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe