Headless Deep Dive Podcast

Arnold Zuboff is a philosopher and the creator of Universalism, which is the idea that there is only one “I”, only one subject and that subject is the “I” in every conscious experience. Zuboff writes about this at length in his book entitled Finding Myself - Beyond the False Boundaries of Personal Identity . In the same way that there is only one novel called “Moby Dick” yet there are multiple boo...

When we look back at our lives, we experience a highlight reel of sorts, all the memorable good and bad experiences and this cinematic metaphor extends into thinking of ourselves as a fixed snapshot: I’m angry, I’m happy, etc. Henri Bergson reminds us that we are not a finished product, we are a process. We are not snapshots, we are a continuing ever-changing flow of experience. In his book Creati...

In today’s episode we continue with Chapter Two of The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth by Douglas Harding . In this chapter, Harding tackles the paradox of experience. We experience the world via sights, sounds and feelings, and in that way the world is “in us”. On the other hand, science explains how the world comes to be experienced through a long complicated chain of events spanning millions of m...

Today, we go back to the roots of the Headless Deep Dive and look at chapter one of Douglas Harding’s book: The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth. There is a fantastic new-ish website which serves as an archive for much of Douglas’s material, where this chapter can be found among many other things like his original handwritten notes, and various photos, etc. The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth , is Doug...

Martin Buber ’s I and Thou is the topic of this week’s Headless Deep Dive. In this classic work of philosophy, Buber explains that we have a two-fold existence. First there is the world of “I-Thou” relationship. This is the world of being here now, meeting the world in mutual relation, which makes it clear to us that “I am”. Then there is the world of “I-It”. This is the world of living in the pas...

Building on the last episode where we explored the thoughts of Merleau-Ponty, in today’s episode we look at this fabulous article by philosopher and researcher Brentyn Ramm entitled Body, Self and Others: Harding, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on Intersubjectivity in which Ramm tackles the differing ways Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean Paul Satre, and Douglas Harding all address the topic of intersubjectiv...

French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty was working on a book tentatively titled “ The Visible and the Invisible ” at the time of his death in 1961. Merleau-Ponty points out that even the simple statement “the world is what we see” leads to a “labyrinth of difficulties and contradictions” about what we mean by the difference between us and the world or what exactly seeing is. In exploring this to...

Douglas Harding says that what I am is two fold. Who I am for others depends on the range of the observer. Who I am for myself is wide open awareness. In today’s episode, we look at a paper by Anil Seth and Manos Tsakiris titled “ Being a beast machine: the somatic basis of selfhood ” where they explore who I “think” am, or more specifically the model of “me” that I predict that I am. The parts of...

In the ABC’s of Relativity , Bertrand Russell explains the strange world of Einstein’s general relativity. One of the most interesting aspects of the theory is not that “everything is relative” in the sense of there being no way to be certain of anything or to discuss anything concretely, it is that everything is relative to a well defined frame of reference. In general relativity there are not se...

On this Easter eve, we turn to this short story by Douglas Harding: My Special Friend to contemplate the notion of everlasting life that is at the heart of Easter. Who is it who has this everlasting life anyway? In the story, a young boy is told his reflection in the mirror is “You Darling”. As time goes on “You Darling” is always there, always with the looker thru good times and bad. Eventually “...

In Erwin Schrödinger’s books, What is Life and Mind and Matter , Schrödinger points out what he calls the “Arthimetical Paradox” that we only ever experience a single consciousness, but there seems to be multiple consciousnesses in the beings around us. Ultimately, Schrödinger concludes: “There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousnesses. Their multiplicit...

Today we are diving into research by Anna Ciaunica and Aikaterini Fotopoulou in this book chapter entitled The Touched Self: Psychological and Philosophical Perspectives on Proximal Intersubjectivity and the Self . In an earlier Headless Deep Dive ( Second Persons and the Constitution of the First Person ) we heard from Jay Garfield and Vasudevi Reddy about how child / caregiver interactions contr...

The core argument of philosopher Daniel Kolak 's book, I Am You , is that we are all the same person, or, more precisely, that a single subject (consciousness) is "incarnated" in all human beings. This idea, often called "Open Individualism" (OI), is not meant in a mystical sense, but as a logical and metaphysical possibility. According to Kolak, it's the most coherent explanation for who we are a...

Physicist John Archibald Wheeler , who coined such terms as “black hole”, “wormhole”, and “quantum foam” wrote about his concept of the “Participatory Universe” in the inspiration for today’s episode — Wheeler’s paper entitled Beyond the Black Hole . Wheeler describes his “delayed choice experiment” which shows that not only does an electron behave as a particle when observed and a wave when not o...

Recently I had the thought “I’m not making things happen, the things that are happening are making me”. For me this resonates with what Alfred North Whitehead describes in his process philosophy as laid out in Adventures of Ideas . It is based on the insight that we are not static subjects observing static objects - everything is becoming rather than just being. Whitehead sees each moment of exper...

18th century philosopher, David Hume ’s essay entitled A Treatise Of Human Nature is the topic of today’s deep dive. Hume analyzes the role of memory and ideas in or own perception of the self. For Hume, there is an immediate “impression” we get from our perceptions that are then later recalled into fuzzier “ideas” about what we perceived. Impressions have a greater “force and liveliness” while id...

This short story entitled Where Am I? by philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett really made my head spin. It is the fascinating tale of a fictional character whose brain and body are separated by radio transmitters. So many questions and scenarios are played out and examined by Dennett in this story. Are we the body? Are we the brain? Are we just the point of view that comes from exper...

Cognitive and computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter is best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach , and his later book I Am a Strange Loop but today’s episode is a talk Hofstadter gave at Stanford in 2006 about how analogies are the “interstate freeway system of cognition” (to use his analogy). In this fascinating and humous lecture, Hofstadter shows how our use of analogy...

Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes outlines his fascinating theory of the bicameral mind in this essay entitled Consciousness and the Voices of the Mind . Jaynes’ theory is that humans were not always conscious in the way we think of being conscious. Jaynes defines consciousness as the “mind space” we use as an analog of the real world and says we use metaphors to describe our introspection of w...

Douglas Harding’s description of the Heirarchy of Heaven and Earth was clearly influenced by Leibniz and Leibniz’s Monadology . In the Monadology Leibniz describes the concept of monads, where each monad represents the entire universe from a unique point of view. Harding says “what I am depends on the range of the observer”. And this implies that to really understand what I am (from a 3rd person p...

Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup takes the “hard problem of consciousness” and completely turns it inside out. Kastrup’s PhD dissertation titled Analytic Idealism: A consciousness-only ontology , argues that consciousness is fundamental. Everything supposedly “material” (including our bodies and brains) are appearances in consciousness. Kastrup uses the concept of alter-egos to describe how we all app...

In his article, On the Nature of Time , Stephen Wolfram describes the computational model he has for the universe and how that results in a new way to look at time. Wolfram is a physicist, computer scientist, author, inventor of Mathematica (software used by scientists and engineers) and Wolfram Alpha (the brains behind Siri) so he knows a thing or two about computation and physics. He has been sp...

You know how in cartoons sometimes they show a dotted line from a person’s eyes to show what the person is looking at? It turns out, that we actually do something like that in our own heads to track what another person is looking at. This paying attention to how we and others around us are paying attention is a part of what Michael Graziano talks about in his theory of consciousness called Attenti...

Do things have properties in and of themselves, or is a thing only what it seems to be to its observer and the interactions it has with other things? Is there a universal notion of time, or is time just a local experience that is different for each observer? These are some of the questions being tackled by Carlo Rovelli in his theory of Relational Quantum Mechanics which was analyzed by Mauro Dora...

The physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (for whom the unit of velocity as compared to the speed of sound was named), brings us today’s episode, based on his book: The Analysis of Sensations . In this book, March argues that our understanding of the world is based on our sensations and that physical objects are merely thought-symbols for complex combinations of these sensations. Mach rejects the d...