Headless Deep Dive Podcast

Thanks to the recommendation of a friend at book club, I bring you today’s episode which instead of being based on an article, is based on a YouTube video of a presentation by researcher Chris Fields entitled What Are Our Bodies ? Have you been feeling old lately? Well, guess what? You are a lot older than you think. According to Fields, our bodies are part of one single body that is 4,000,000,000...

The Three Dialogues , written in 1713 by George Berkeley lays out his philosophy of “indeterminism” via a series of dialogues between two characters: Hylas (representing common sense) and Philonous (representing Berkeley as the philosopher). This writing style may have been an inspiration for the approach Douglas Harding takes in parts of the Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth as a device to argue agai...

The NotebookLM tool that I use to generate these podcasts just got an upgrade which allows me to provide input to the “hosts” as to how they approach their discussion. This allows me to now indicated that this podcast is called the Headless Deep Dive and is targeted to those interested in the Headless Way. I’m thrilled with the outcome and I hope you are too. Today’s episode is based on the Essays...

If the sense of being a “me” is an illusion, where does it come from? That’s a topic that Professor Jay Garfield covers in today’s article called: Second Persons and the Constitution of the First Person . In the article, Garfield cites the work of developmental psychologist Vasudevi Reddy, who emphasizes the role of dyadic (two-way) interactions in infants and the way these interactions contribute...

Today’s article is called HOW AND WHY CONSCIOUSNESS ARISES: SOME CONSIDERATIONS FROM PHYSICS AND PHYSIOLOGY by Mark Solms and Karl Friston. What I find fascinating about this paper is the detailed description of the active inference process used by us humans, and other intelligences, to model the world, predict what it is we should be sensing and then either adjust those predictions based on predi...

Today’s article, Predicting green: really radical (plant) predictive processing by Paco Calvo and Karl Friston reveals that plants, like animals, engage in predictive processing - a fundamental aspect of intelligence involving predictions and evidence-gathering to minimize surprise and uncertainty. Despite lacking a central nervous system, plants demonstrate intelligence through adaptive behaviors...

Michael Levin is one of my favorite scientists. He and his collaborators are working in the area of biology and cognition with a framework he calls the Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere (TAME), which I find to be very much compatible with eastern philosophy and the Headless Way. One of the most mind blowing papers is Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence . This pape...

Our first episode of Headless Deep Dive of course has to be based on the writings of Douglas Harding. Douglas’s book, On Having No Head , is one of his best known and most influential books. It clearly points us to the direct experience of what it is like to be open awareness. I was flabbergasted to hear the AI generate hosts truly grasp the concepts laid out in this seminal work by Douglas Hardin...