Adventures Among Ideas

I talk with film reviewer and literary critic CJ Sheu (許景順) about how he got into film reviewing, his favorite critics, the differences between academic and journalistic criticism, the relation between literature and film, and more.

Is it immoral to depict or commit violence in video games? What about sexual violence? Daniel Tarpy and I discuss the gamer's dilemma and the nature of games.

Why video games are not art but are still culturally valuable. Compares the aesthetic attitude to the ludic attitude.

Daniel Tarpy and I talk with Johannes "Yogi" Jaeger about a wide range of topics, including: why philosophy should be important to biology, how our ideas affect the world we live in, the differences between living systems and algorithm-based systems, Michael Levin's "Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere," and the importance of art.

Further thoughts on emergence and consciousness. Written version: https://daviddennen.medium.com/emergence-and-consciousness-reconsidered-7a5c19d5759b

I and Daniel Tarpy try to figure out what emergence means. Is it novelty? Is it the unpredictable? Is it rare? Is it everywhere? What sorts of things are emergent? How do we know when something is emergent? In part 2 we try to explain in what sense we think consciousness is emergent. Along the way we discuss dualism, panpsychism, physicalism, idealism, and pragmatism.

On the concept of "qualitative binding" in art with reference to John Dewey, John Middleton Murry, Susanne Langer, Vincent van Gogh, and Richard Wright.

In this conversation I, Daniel Tarpy, and Tyler Piteo-Tarpy discuss several ways of thinking about fundamental reality, including idealism, materialism/physicalism, pantheism and panentheism, pragmatism/relationalism, and triunalism. The conversation is exploratory; hopefully we’ll revisit certain topics in more depth in the future.

Do we have free will? Does it matter? Daniel Tarpy joins me to discuss the free will debate. We discuss some classic and recent ideas about free will and determinism, including those of Robert Sapolsky, Kevin Mitchell, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, John Dewey, C. A. Campbell, and Roderick Chisolm.

I argue that the problem with Frank Jackson's Knowledge Argument (or Mary's Room Argument) against physicalism is that it's not about knowledge.

What does John Dewey have to say about aesthetic experience?

Is it possible for an artificial intelligence to become really conscious? Are some AIs already conscious, as at least a few people think? And in particular, are large-language-model-based chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Bard—which after all seem to express thoughts and feelings—conscious? If so, in what sense are they conscious? How conscious are they?

In this episode I look at four essays by the philosopher Jay Ogilvy on paradigm shifts, the nature of power, and possible futures. -- Ogilvy, James. “Understanding Power.” Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol. 5, no. 2 (1978): 128–144. https://doi.org/10.1177/019145377800500202 Ogilvy, James. “From Command to Co-Evolution: Toward a New Paradigm for Human Ecology.” Ecological Consciousness: Essay...

A discussion of experiential knowledge and virtual experience based on Dorothy Walsh's Literature and Knowledge (1969).

More on the relation between literature and knowledge, this time through the work of Eliseo Vivas.

Does literature give us knowledge? If so, what kind of knowledge? And knowledge about what? In this episode I explore literature as propositional knowledge, behavioral knowledge, and reorientational knowledge. Based on Morse Peckham's essay "Literature and Knowledge" (1972).

Discusses Derrida's deconstruction as a kind of double reading. Useful Readings: *Abrams, M. H. “Construing and Deconstructing” (1986). Collected with Abrams’ other essay on deconstruction in Doing Things with Texts (1989). https://archive.org/details/doingthingswitht00abra *Kakoliris, Gerasimos. Derrida’s Deconstructive Double Reading: The Case of Rousseau (2022). https://www.academia.edu/7838933...

In this episode I discuss Wayne C. Booth's four values for good critical (and perhaps social and political) life. Based on Booth's Critical Understanding (1979).

Is Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle a behaviorist? Listen and find out!

In this episode I discuss a few ideas of the literary critic J. Hillis Miller on the ethics of reading.

More theories of the mind: panpsychism, mind-brain identity theory, and behaviorism!

Introducing three classic theories of the mind from a dualistic perspective: interactionism, parallelism, and epiphenomenalism.

On the incoherences in traditional psychology and how behaviorism tried to resolve them.

How do we come to know about our own subjective states? B. F. Skinner has given a pretty clear analysis of how this happens in his article “The Operational Analysis of Psychological Terms” (1945) and his book Verbal Behavior (1957). I discuss.

Dr. Will Kitchen joins me for a conversation about his book Romanticism and Film: Franz Liszt and Audio-Visual Explanation (Bloomsbury, 2021). Dr. Kitchen is currently a teaching fellow in film studies at the University of Southampton. We discuss how Romanticism influenced the development of film and how Romantics such as Franz Liszt have been represented in cinema.