Exploring the Hard Problems of Mind and Life
8 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 2 years ago -The ultimate goal of this podcast is understanding what it means to be alive, conscious, and free (to choose life).
In the first series of interviews, Barry Komisaruk and I discuss biological rhythms, excitation-inhibition balances, self-organized criticality, the nature(s) of pleasure and pain, consciousness, agency, and more.
Future podcasts will have discussions with additional scholars, with the goal of going into greater depth than is common practice. Some conversations will be brief, and others will be longer series. Please contact me if you're interested in exploring ideas.
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Episodes
Episode 8: Conversation with Barry Komisaruk
October 23, 2021 21:22 - 45 minutes - 42.1 MBThis is the 8th of a series of conversations with Barry Komisaruk. We discussed the nature(s) of informational and physical flows in mind and life, the potentially synesthetic affective nature of all perception, and ways in which core body processes may provide scaffolding for all other aspects of the evolution and development of minds. Next week: Thinking about ways in which ontogeny does and does not recapitulate phylogeny; considering the mind as music. Last week's discussion (with pre...
Episode 7: Conversation with Barry Komisaruk
October 23, 2021 21:22 - 59 minutes - 55.5 MBThis is the 7th of a series of conversations with Barry Komisaruk. This conversation continued our exploration on the nature(s) of body maps in brain and mind, going more deeply into how these may inform our understanding of the physical and computational substrates of consciousness. Last week's discussion (with previous discussions linked in the video description). Some links of potential relevance for today's discussion: On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins A Thousand Brains: A New Theory ...
Episode 6: Conversation with Barry Komisaruk
October 23, 2021 21:22 - 1 hour - 56.2 MBThis is the 6th of a series of conversations with Barry Komisaruk. This conversation focused on the nature(s) of body maps in brain and mind, including some initial discussions of how these may inform our understanding of the physical and computational substrates of consciousness. Last week's discussion (with previous discussions linked in the video description): Some links of potential relevance for today's discussion: Body-perception as inference: Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramacha...
Episode 5: Conversation with Barry Komisaruk
October 23, 2021 21:22 - 1 hour - 57.4 MBThis is the fifth of a series of conversations with Barry Komisaruk. In this conversation we discussed a broad range of topics, ranging from similarities and differences in the principles of organization of insect and vertebrate nervous systems, to language and the meaning of meaning as wholistic resonance, to spatiotemporal binding/alignment via traveling waves in the hippocampus, and more. Last week's discussion (with previous discussions linked in the video description). Some links of ...
Episode 4: Conversation with Barry Komisaruk
October 23, 2021 21:22 - 56 minutes - 52 MBThis is the fourth of a series of conversations with Barry Komisaruk. Last week's discussion (with previous discussions linked in the video description). Some links of potential relevance for today's discussion: Entwinement - I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter (publicism.info) Wedding Haka - Subtitled & translated - YouTube See - Jason Momoa - Performs Haka - YouTube Rapid Anxiety Reduction (RAR): A unified theory of humor (arxiv.org) The Radically Embodied Conscious Cybernet...
Episode 3: Conversation with Barry Komisaruk
October 23, 2021 21:22 - 52 minutes - 49 MBThis is the third of a series of conversations with Barry Komisaruk. Last week's discussion (with previous discussions linked in the video description): Some links of potential relevance for today's discussion: When frequencies never synchronize: The golden mean and the resting EEG - ScienceDirect Breathing is coupled with voluntary action and the cortical readiness potential | Nature Communications Creativity and the default network: A functional connectivity analysis of the creative b...
Episode 2: Conversation with Barry Komisaruk
October 23, 2021 21:21 - 42 minutes - 39.2 MBThis is the second of a series of conversations with Barry Komisaruk. Today we went into greater detail on the mechanisms and significance(s) of different forms of neural synchrony. This one "gets into the weeds," which will provide an increasingly stable foundation for what's to come. What's to come? We are gradually working our way to describing a mechanistic neurophenomenological understanding of nearly every aspect of mind, including consciousness, agency, and spirituality (including ...
Episode 1: Conversation with Barry Komisaruk
October 23, 2021 21:21 - 38 minutes - 36 MBThis is the first of a series of conversations with Barry Komisaruk. We are following up on previous discussions of the nature of biological rhythms, excitation-inhibition balances, self-organized criticality, the nature(s) of pleasure and pain, consciousness, agency, and more. In the coming weeks and months we will explore all of these topics (and more), with the ultimate goal of understanding what it means to be alive, conscious, and free (to choose life). Previous conversations: Neuro...