Clerestory (Bryan Kam)

How do you balance your life’s purpose, your creative impulse, or your art, with the realities of life? Here are the next four responses I've received. Thanks to Adam , Isabela , ⁠Gareth , and Catherine . I'm still taking submissions. Please upload your audio response here: ⁠⁠https://bryankam.com/record⁠⁠ . I will release episodes from responses I receive, aiming for 30-45 minute episodes...

How do you balance your life’s purpose, your creative impulse, or your art, with the realities of life? Here are the first seven responses I've received. Thanks to Nasos , Romeo , Jay , Khuyen (Kasper), Joachim , Nicole , and Nathan . I'm still taking submissions. Please upload your audio response here: ⁠https://bryankam.com/record⁠ . I will release episodes from responses I receive, aimin...

How do you balance your life’s purpose, your creative impulse, or your art, with the realities of life? Please upload your audio response here: https://bryankam.com/record . I will release episodes from responses I receive, every time I receive 45 minutes. Clerestory by ⁠⁠Bryan Kam⁠⁠ • Infrequent updates at ⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠ • All my work plus exclusive content at ⁠⁠Patreon

In this episode I spoke to my friend Eyal Shay in a series of voicenotes, recorded over a period of a few months at the start of this year. This episode is an experiment in epistolary podcasting 😊 Over the course of the pandemic I got to know people from the internet quite well through voicenotes. These were sent asynchronously to overcome timezone and calendar fatigue. In this episode, Eyal and...

This is a continuation of the conversation I had with Maggie previously: "The Dark Forest and Generative AI." We discuss why we write, versus why to use AI and LLMs to produce writing, and what effects that loss is likely to have. Discussed in this episode: Why do humans write? Writing is around 5,000 years old We mention a note-taking system called a "Zettelkasten" which I wro...

Part 5 in a series of interviews on the book I'm working on, Neither/Nor . In this episode, ⁠⁠Isabela Granic⁠⁠ begin the discussion with Whitehead and his assertion that philosophy must be in conversation with the sciences. Topics discussed: My enormous Kuhn thread Are we in a scientific crisis? My recording of Kuhn's lecture: "Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice" (197...

Part 4 in a series of interviews on the book I'm working on, Neither/Nor . In this episode, ⁠Isabela Granic⁠ and I discuss how AI technologies like ChatGPT relate to experience. We move into Schopenhauer's distinction between rationality and the intuition in The World as Will and Representation. Topics discussed: Previous podcast episode: ⁠The AI and Dark Forest, with Maggie Appleton⁠ The...

Part 3 in a series of interviews on the book I'm working on, Neither/Nor . In this episode, Isabela Granic and I discuss how AI technologies like ChatGPT relate to living textual traditions. We then move into Socrates vs Zhuangzi, and the Pyrrhonist "middle way" between dogmatism and nihilism. Topics discussed: Previous podcast episode: The AI and Dark Forest, with Maggie Appleton The relationship...

In this episode I spoke to my friend Joachim Brackx in a series of voicenotes, recorded over a period of a few weeks at the end of last year. See more about Joachim (and hear his mellifluous podcast!) at Relating to Self . This episode is an experiment in epistolary podcasting 😊 Over the course of the pandemic I got to know people from the internet quite well through voicenotes. These were sent a...

In this episode I speak to Rob Knight about approaches to meditation. We discuss the Buddhist traditions, how dependent origination relates to emptiness, cognitive science, and the problem of universals in philosophy. I speak about the ideas in   Neither/Nor , the book I'm writing, and the two complimentary modes required to understand and interact with the world. My website . Occasional upda...

Part 2 in a series of interviews on the book I'm working on, Neither/Nor . Isabela Granic and I recap dependent origination and discuss how I encountered philosophy through Russian literature, Taoism, and eventually got interested in Western philosophy. My article: "Dependent Origination without any Pali" "The Disarticulation of the Self in Nietzsche" (1981) by J. Hillis Miller PDF Brian Magee art...

I was awarded an InterIntellect fellowship! See the announcement here . In this episode, I speak in the Wood about what I'm interested in and why. This includes Pyrrhonism, Buddhism, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hume, Peirce, Kuhn, Jaynes, McGilchrist, and more. I will post the Rob Knight podcast soon! I mentioned my friend's podcast: Growing Up with Delia Burgess . Occasional updates on my S...

I'm joined by developmental psychologist Isabela Granic and historian Sam Biagetti to discuss the differences between how reasoning is used in experimental sciences versus historical sciences. How do we get certainty from physics experiments? How do we get certainty about what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs? What do "nomothetic" and "idiographic" mean? We continue on from the discussion in...

We discuss Maggie's recent article The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI , and other issues related to generative models, machine learning, ChatGPT, and more! Also mentioned: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off . Please consider supporting my ongoing work on Patreon .

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: @bryankam@writing.exchange . Clerestory by Bryan Kam • Infrequent updates at Substack • All...

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...

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, G...

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 , Pete...

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 cont...

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...

This is a live conversation I recorded on Twitter Spaces on 11 January 2022, between me ( Bryan Kam ), Isabela Granic , Athenian Stranger , and others. We discuss abstraction and perfection, including Spinoza's Ethics , Charles Sanders Peirce, the medieval scholastics, as well as Ancient Chinese, and Greek philosophy. I edited out the very beginning, when we were getting set up, but otherwise it i...