The Side View

In this episode of the podcast I spoke with Joe Norman. Joe describes himself as a recovering academic and an applied complexity scientist. He focuses on complex systems engineering and design, systemic and large-scale risk, systems strategy, and systems-thinking education. This work, Joe tells me, is engaged in for the pursuit of liberty, localism, self-determination, and self-sufficiency.

I’m joined today by David Collins, who some of you may recognize as a contributor to The Side View essay series. He’s contributed two articles, one on Western mysticism and contemplative practice and another on the history of mindfulness in the United States. You’ll notice at the top of the show that I took a different approach in this episode in that I asked David to lead us through two short meditation exercises—one at the beginning of the episode and another one towards the end. As you’ll hear in a moment, David is an experienced and excellent guide in these areas, so I encourage you all to follow along and participate with us.

Peter Sjöstedt-H is an Anglo-Scandinavian philosopher of mind and a metaphysician who specializes in the thought of Whitehead, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, with special regard to panpsychism and altered states of sentience. Peter received a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and a Master’s degree in Continental Philosophy from the University of Warwick, where he was awarded a first-class distinction for his dissertation on Kant and Schelling in relation to intellectual intuition. He subsequently became a Philosophy Lecturer in London for six years and has now passed his PhD at Exeter University, where he also teaches philosophy modules and writing skills. Peter is the author of Noumenautics and is an inspiration behind the inhuman philosopher Marvel Superhero, Karnak.

Roope Kaaronen is a Doctoral Candidate at the Environmental Policy Research Group at the University of Helsinki. His research interests include pro-environmental behavior and cognition, the socio-cognitive aspects of environmental crisis, and the organization of science in society. His research draws on embodied cognitive science, ecological and environmental psychology, affordance theory, philosophy of science and mind, sociology, and systems theory.

Erik Davis is an author, a podcaster, an award-winning journalist, and a lecturer based in San Francisco. His wide-ranging work focuses on the intersection of alternative religion, media, and the popular imagination. He is the author of several books, including Nomad Codes, The Visionary State, and TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information.

His work has been translated into a dozen languages, and his essays have appeared in scores of books, including Zig Zag Zen, Magic in the Modern World, The World According to Philip K. Dick, and AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Μan.

Erik explores the cultures of consciousness on his long-running weekly podcast Expanding Mind, on the Progressive Radio Network. He has also written for The Wire, Bookforum, Arthur, Artforum, Wired, the LA Weekly, and the Village Voice, and he has been interviewed by CNN, the BBC, public radio, and the New York Times.

He graduated magna cum laude from Yale University, and recently earned his PhD in religious studies at Rice University. His next book, High Weirdness: Drugs, Visions, and Esoterica in the Seventies, will be out in the Spring of 2019 through MIT Press and Strange Attractor.

Aaron Weiss is a doctoral candidate in philosophy and religion program at CIIS in San Francisco, where he studies Indo-Tibetan and Western philosophies.

What you’re about to hear is a live episode of the podcast that we recorded on October 4 in San Francisco. This event coincided with the launch of The Side View website and it gave me a chance to describe the TSV vision in front of a few friends and colleagues. In the first 30 or 40 minutes of the episode, I take a deeper dive into some of the philosophical influences that went into creating The Side View. I talk about the French philosopher Pierre Hadot and his conception of philosophy as a mode of existential training or exercise, I get into a little bit of phenomenology through the work of Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Dan Zahavi, and I talk about the role of media ecology and affordance environments in The Side View’s general philosophy. As I mention at the start of the talk, you can also find a shorter four-minute version of these ideas on the About page of our website, but if you want the full back story on TSV and its inspirations, this episode is a great place to start. As always, feel free to drop us a line if these lines of thought spark any new questions or ideas for you. I hope you enjoy the episode.

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