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Extrapolator is a philosophy/science podcast hosted by Geoff Allen. What is philosophy? How do we define what is true or what exists? Is human cognition special? What can empirical science say about religion, free will and the meaning of life? These topics, and more.
Episodes
Thursday May 26, 2022
Thursday May 26, 2022
What if we could recreate our forests, using biotech to bring back trees that are extinct? We now have that technology. We could replant a modified American chestnut tree all across the eastern United States. But should we do it?
A conversation about genetic engineering, human intervention, nature, the wild and what is meant to be.
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Evelyn Brister is a Professor of Philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY, USA. She is President of the Public Philosophy Network, a professional organisation that supports philosophers in collaborative teaching and scholarship outside their academic communities. She is the editor, with Robert Frodeman, of A Guide to Field Philosophy (Routledge, 2020), a collection of essays examining collaborations between philosophers and policymakers, and she has written over 20 journal articles in philosophy and environmental science.
Evelyn’s current research examines how values shape the use of biotechnology for conservation as well as other issues in land use and management. In 2020, she took part in a workshop with Revive & Restore to assess the possible application of genomic tools to plant and wildlife conservation.
Read Evelyn’s paper, ‘Not the Same Old Chestnut: Rewilding Forests with Biotechnology’: https://www.acf.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/2020-Brister-Newhouse-Env-Ethics.pdf
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Tuesday Mar 22, 2022
Tuesday Mar 22, 2022
The ultimate guide to creating a podcast: (1) branding, (2) prepping content, (3) producing audio, and (4) distributing/promoting.
If you’re a podcast enthusiast, you'll hear about the secrets from behind the scenes. And if you want to create your own podcast, this is a great place to learn about all the steps, from start to finish.
Philipp the Interpolator (a good friend of mind) agreed to wear the interviewer hat for the day. Listen as Philipp probes me about the process and learns how to create and publish a podcast.
There’s a ‘cheat sheet’ that comes with this episode. It’s a visual summary of everything you need to know about the podcasting process and it’s available for free at:
geoffallenwriting.wordpress.com/cheatsheet
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Wednesday Dec 08, 2021
Wednesday Dec 08, 2021
In this episode, Geoff and Richard discuss the Headless Way, which is a set of reflections and guided meditations that centre around seeing *who you really are*. Richard even guides the listener through a few ‘experiments’ from the Headless Way.
The Headless Way seeks to highlight what experience is like from a first-person point of view – as a subject. When you look at the world as a subject, you have no head. That’s ‘headlessness’. Of course, you still have a head, but it’s only visible from the third-person point of view – as an object, as a person.
As adults, we go through life seeing ourselves as others see us. For others, we are an object, a person (with a head), a thing. So, we learn to see ourselves as an object for others. Richard encourages us to re-learn what it is like to see ourselves from the first-person point of view – as headless subjects, as empty space for the world.
Geoff and Richard discuss the many, deep implications of the Headless Way: identity (who is at the centre of experience?); third-person science versus the science of the first person; links with psychology and mainstream science; theory of mind; stages of development; learning to wear your face; creativity; learning to live with dualisms; otherness and separateness; projection and reflection; sociology, politics and foreign policy; perception; our experience of time; the distance of observation in physics; other animals; other sense modalities; language and culture; and other topics.
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Richard Lang discovered the Headless Way in 1970 when he met Douglas Harding, author of On Having No Head. Though he was only 17, Richard recognised that the Headless Way experiments are astonishingly effective at delivering the experience of *who you really are*. Since then, Richard has been involved in sharing the experience of *who we really are* with others and now has many friends around the world. In 1996, he set up the Shollond Trust, a UK charity dedicated to sharing the Headless Way.
Richard is the author of the books Seeing Who You Really Are (2003), Open to the Source: Selected Teachings of Douglas Harding (2005), Celebrating Who We Are (2017), The Man With No Head: The Life and Ideas of Douglas Harding (2017) – and the editor of a recent volume of Douglas Harding’s work, As I See It: Articles, selected by Richard Lang (2018). He is also the narrator for audiobook versions of Harding’s books, The Science of the First Person and On Having No Head.
You can find more material on the Headless Way in several places: on Richard’s website (headless.org); on YouTube (youtube.com/RichardLangHeadexchange); through The Headless Way app (on iTunes App Store or Google Play); through Waking Up, a meditation app by Sam Harris; and on Richard’s own podcast channel (search for ‘Richard Lang – Headless Way’).
If you wish to attend a free Zoom meeting with others who are interested in the Headless Way, please contact Richard through his website (headless.org).
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Wednesday Nov 24, 2021
Wednesday Nov 24, 2021
In this episode, Geoff and Lauren discuss a range of causal concepts and analogies that we encounter in scientific work. Lauren is doing important work in philosophy of science, writing about casual explanations. She argues that the concept of a ‘mechanism’ (an analogy to a machine) has been over-extended, particularly by new mechanist philosophers. Lauren points to the other causal concepts used by scientists: a ‘pathway’ (an analogy to a roadway) and a ‘cascade’ (an analogy to a waterfall or the snowball effect). The evidence points towards a diversity of causal concepts and causal structures.
Geoff and Lauren discuss: analogies for causation (mechanism, pathway, cascade); distinguishing mechanism vs. pathway; distinguishing mechanism vs. cascade; making connection in different domains of life; analogies and other language for explaining; stories and visual imagery; causation and the goal of control; the observer in science; insights from cognitive science (in fields like causal cognition or cognitive metaphysics); investigating human biases; Lauren’s background from medical school to HPS; big picture questions about medicine (biology, diseases, patient outcomes); applying medical training to HPS; causation as it features in different scientific disciplines; background conditions in biology vs. physics; three types of pluralism (structures, methods and the definition of causation); and other topics!
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Lauren Ross is an Associate Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine. She has an MD from the School of Medicine at the University of California, Irvine and a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh. This crossover influences a good deal of her work in philosophy of biology, philosophy of neuroscience and philosophy of medicine.
Lauren’s research focuses on causation and explanation in science. In her recent work, she analyses how scientists provide explanations by using various causal concepts and analogies, such as ’mechanism’, ‘pathway’ and ‘cascade’. For this work she has received the NSF Career Award and the Humboldt Experienced Researcher Fellowship. In other projects, Lauren has discussed causal explanation in neuroscience (neural connections in the brain), in psychiatry (psychiatric genetics) and in chemistry (the periodic table).
https://www.lps.uci.edu/~rossl/
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Wednesday Nov 10, 2021
Wednesday Nov 10, 2021
In this episode, Geoff and Tim discuss philosophy for daily life. In particular, they talk about Stoicism: the wisdom that the Ancient Stoics can offer us, and which parts might be useful for life in the twenty-first century. They present these topics in an accessible way, discussing bitesize quotes, and reflecting on ways that philosophy can be relevant to the people and situations we encounter in daily life.
They discuss: applying philosophy to entrepreneurship and business; Stoic meditations; modern commentators on Stoicism, like William Irvine and Ryan Holiday; logos; pain and suffering; control; reason and emotion; nihilism and meaning; the historical lens versus the philosophical lens; psychology and stress management techniques; negative visualisation; prospective retrospective; the meaning of life; hedonism versus tranquility; pleasure; accepting versus resisting; philosophical tools and philosophical solutions; and other topics.
Geoff and Tim begin by reminiscing about how they met. It all came from a chance encounter in South East Asia in 2018…
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Tim Haldorsson is an entrepreneur. He works in tech and runs a marketing and web development team. Tim is an everyday philosopher, who uses ancient philosophy to guide him in making business decisions. For these practices, he draws on books like Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
Tim is also a big fan of traveling and has spent the last five years living away from his home country, Sweden, visiting many different countries. These destinations have included: Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, South Africa and – most recently – Portugal and Madeira Island. Tim likes to think of himself as a digital nomad.
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Wednesday Oct 27, 2021
Wednesday Oct 27, 2021
In this episode, Geoff Allen speaks with Pete Mandik about perception and reality. They touch on some of the most intriguing issues concerning representation, egocentricity and perspective. Moreover, they discuss the different ways that minds make sense of reality – such as, the conception of hydrogen versus the conception of a hipster.
Geoff and Pete start with a more general discussion of backgrounds and upbringings. They swap stories of being children with philosophical thoughts and, later, discovering philosophy as a path. They also cover: popularising philosophy; mixing philosophy with art and music; drawing on empirical work; the PR problems of academics and intellectuals; political persecution of academics (in Mexico and Hungary); totalising projects for unifying knowledge; intellectual modesty; and other topics.
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Pete Mandik is a Professor of Philosophy at William Paterson University. He is the author of the books Key Terms in Philosophy of Mind (2010) and This is Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction (2013), and a co-author of the book Cognitive Science: An Introduction to the Mind and Brain (2006). His latest book, Physicalist Theories of Consciousness, will be published by Cambridge University Press as part of the Elements in Philosophy of Mind series, edited by Keith Frankish.
Pete’s research touches on points of intersection between philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences, especially neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence. He is primarily interested in naturalistic accounts of consciousness and intentionality. His main lines of research to date have focused largely on three areas: (i) neurophilosophical explanations of phenomenal consciousness; (ii) artificial-life experiments on the evolutionary emergence of representational content; and (iii) the role of action-oriented representations as the basis for enactive cognition and perception.
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Wednesday Oct 13, 2021
Wednesday Oct 13, 2021
In this episode, Geoff Allen speaks with Jenann Ismael about puzzles surrounding subjectivity. They discuss topics like time, pain, colour and spatial navigation. In all of these cases, there is a puzzle about how subjective experiences can be reconciled with objective descriptions.
Jenann’s treatment of perspectives and points of view is wonderfully insightful. She frames the metaphysical question in terms of ‘frames of reference’. Certain experiences (pain, colour, the flow of time) only exist within the ‘frame’ of a particular system. They are frame-dependent phenomena.
We should not expect frame-independent descriptions to capture these phenomena. Such descriptions are not only incomplete but incompletable!
As Jenann puts it: ‘Physics doesn’t just *allow* for frame dependence, physics *entails* that there will be frame-dependent quantities – if there are, on the one hand, intrinsic quantities and, on the other hand, observers of those intrinsic quantities.’
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Going deeper, there is also a puzzle about the metaphysics of subjects in the world: ‘We aren’t separate from the world; we are enacting the world as we’re representing it, and that partly means that we have an effect on what is the case,’ Jenann argues. ‘We see both reflections of ourselves in the world and reflections of the world back at us. The world… it pushes back on you, just as you push into the world.’
What does this mean for objectivity and realism? How can we reconcile the place of subjective experience in the world? Tune in, folks!!
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Jenann Ismael is a Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. She has also taught at Stanford University (1996–1998) and the University of Arizona (1998–2018). She received her PhD from Princeton University in 1997. Jenann is the author of the books Essays on Symmetry (2001), The Situated Self (2007), How Physics Makes Us Free (2016) and Time: A Very Short Introduction (2021).
Jenann’s work falls into two rough classes. First, there are concerns drawn from the philosophy of physics – for example, the structure of space and time, the foundations of quantum mechanics, the role of simplicity and symmetry in physics, the nature of probability, natural laws and causal relations. Second, questions surrounding mind, cognition, phenomenology and the nature of perspective. Jenann has been described, by John Perry, as ‘a leading philosopher of her generation’.
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Wednesday Sep 29, 2021
Wednesday Sep 29, 2021
In this episode, Geoff Allen and Sam Hafkenscheid convene for a good old-fashioned debate about God and religious beliefs. Geoff takes the side of atheism/naturalism. Sam takes the side of faith/theism.
On the side of atheism, Geoff argues that we can explain (and discard) religious belief as an evolutionary adaptation. But what about meaning and morality? Geoff accepts the nihilism that comes with an atheistic position! He sketches an invitation to see the world with ‘optimistic nihilism’ (see episode #8 for a full exposition). He argues that the naturalistic package of rights/freedoms/meanings has the most pragmatic benefit for human flourishing. This is especially true in ‘zero sum’ political conflicts over abortion or discrimination.
On the side of theism, Sam argues that we require the idea of God to explain why things exist. What existed before the Big Bang, before time and before naturalistic causes? A mind, like God, is the most plausible explanation, Sam argues. Sam also challenges Geoff’s atheistic conception of meaning and morality. Without God, the only moral truth would be an ‘anything goes’ nihilism. At the very least, this means that atheists should live and let live. If it’s just nihilism and evolutionary adaptation, then trying to convert people to atheism is a waste of resources.
Geoff and Sam also discuss: Sam’s career in professional gaming and coaching; the journey versus the result in creative pursuits; losing yourself in a creative process; creativity as ‘flowing with the river’ versus ‘creating the river’; worldviews (our deepest-level beliefs); theistic versus naturalistic attitudes about abortion; how to change someone’s deepest attitudes and how to engage with people who share different worldviews; and other topics!
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Sam Hafkenscheid is a physicist, philosopher and professional DotA coach. He specialises in the areas of quantum physics and evolutionary biology and loves to investigate the relation between science and religion. He is also passionate about working in the field of education, with past experience as a private high school tutor and as a teaching assistant (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Utrecht University).
Sam is a professional DotA coach at Gamer Sensei, an esports coaching platform owned by Corsair. He has amassed over 15,000 hours both playing DotA and helping hundreds of DotA players to achieve their competitive goals. Sam received a bachelor in physics and astronomy at the University of Amsterdam and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is currently working towards a masters in history and philosophy of science at Utrecht University.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/samhafkenscheid
https://www.gamersensei.com/senseis/skullcandy82
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This episode includes fragments from the track, ‘Optimism/Choate’, written and recorded by Geoff Allen. This music originally appeared in Extrapolator episodes #7 and #8, and it follows the themes of naturalism and optimistic nihilism! The full soundtrack for the Extrapolator podcast is available on Spotify (and all major platforms). Just search for: ‘Extrapolator: Original Podcast Soundtrack’… or click here: https://sptfy.com/6wYf
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Wednesday Sep 22, 2021
Wednesday Sep 22, 2021
In this episode, Geoff Allen speaks with Tom Beakbane about his new book, How to Understand Everything. Consilience: A New Way to See the World. Geoff and Tom delve into the core themes of the book – the neurobiology of humans and other organisms, how the brain constructs and interprets the world, and why we must frame everything in terms of brain science, in order to ‘understand’ everything.
In a nutshell, Tom claims that we must understand brains in order to understand reality – and human knowledge about reality.
Geoff and Tom also discuss: Tom’s academic background; Tom’s career in marketing and entrepreneurship; activities that are ‘scientific’ versus ‘businesslike’; pointified labels for human activities; the need to ‘brand’ an idea; our own labels (‘Consilience’ and ‘Extrapolator’); the history of consilience (William Whewell and Edward O. Wilson); the unity of knowledge; convergence across multiple perspectives and disciplines; how social interactions shape our conception of reality; the metaphysics of ‘reality’ from the standpoint of neurophysiology; the metaphysics of mathematics; the incredible effectiveness of mathematics; instances of the Fibonacci series (plant leaves, snail shells and spiral galaxies); ‘bottom-up’ explanations; complexity and complex systems (brains, hurricanes and pandemics); the neurobiology of consciousness; the evolutionary function of consciousness; whether consciousness has been explained (or is explainable) by empirical science; life history and phenomenal consciousness; how philosophy can engage with empirical science and fill in the gaps; the future of philosophy and philosophical debates; and other topics.
Tom Beakbane is president of Beakbane: Brand Strategies and Communications, a company he launched in 1986 to capitalise on digital technologies. Tom and his team have delivered over 20,000 projects to Fortune 500 customers in a wide variety of industries including pharmaceuticals, sexual health, nutrition, education, grocery, industrial and high-tech products.
Tom’s journey to resurrect the concept of consilience began when he tried to understand why textbook explanations of human behaviour did not account for the techniques routinely used by marketing communications and political operatives. Also he observed that textbook psychology did not explain the interpersonal dynamics he observed while providing services to his company’s clients. He realised that by weaving together developments on the frontlines of biology, physics and computing and reconceptualising human behaviour as an emergent system it was possible to explain the nature of understanding in ways that are all-embracing.
Tom has an honours degree in biochemistry and neurophysiology from Durham University in England.
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Wednesday Sep 15, 2021
Wednesday Sep 15, 2021
In this episode, Geoff Allen interviews Sean Carroll about his career as a theoretical physicist and science communicator. Sean speaks about his work with great energy and insight. He also ends with some pragmatic advice for graduate students!
Geoff and Sean cover topics such as: choosing a career path; the region of overlap between philosophy and science; productivity and workflow; life as an academic and science communicator; getting credit and ‘anti-credit’ for popularising science; mathematical ideas versus linguistic metaphors; simplification versus translation of complex ideas; public trust in scientists; science and scientists on social media; the motivations for podcasting; podcasting as a licence to talk to people!; how to tackle misinformation; the onus on readers to be discerning about sources; purpose, end goal and having fun at graduate school; and other topics.
Sean Carroll is a research professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology and a member of the Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. He is also a well-known communicator of science – writing popular science books, contributing to magazines and journals, and appearing on popular science television shows.
Sean is the author of Something Deeply Hidden (2019), The Big Picture (2016), The Particle at the End of the Universe (2012), From Eternity to Here (2010) and Spacetime and Geometry (2003). He has made appearances on television shows like The Colbert Report and Through the Wormhole, with Morgan Freeman. Since 2018, he has hosted his own podcast, Sean Carroll’s Mindscape.
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