AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Listened to this one while driving around, so notes are sketchy. And it was largely meta, the hosts talking about the podcast and podcasting itself.
Went back for a 2nd listen, this episode is significant for me because they tackle scientific materialism fairly head-on.
flow states and religion. an unusually dumb discussion of neural vs transcendent. Sapolsky ref: he rejects free will, but faces the contradictions and nihilism (should check that out).
Bruno Latour ref. If you take away agency from humans you end up giving it to neurons or proteins etc. This insight was at the root of my dissertation but it's weird to hear it from Weird Studies. "They can't communicate an idea without assuming agents". YES. Selfish Gene ref. Latour: at the hypothesis stage you assume agency, and at the end you must use agecny to explain. But in the middle, its just math, not agency (hm, wish I had the exact ref).
PF: Sapolsky-style materialism is a form of asceticism. But not spiritual, so what's the point? JFM: Spinozan, a spiritually-responsible materialism. To be enlightened in this view is to acknowledge our meat-machine nature.
PF: submission is key (for science, spiritual practice, art) and moderns don't do it. Sloterdijk, askesis, we submit ourselves to practice.
Science presents itself as revelation just like the Upanishads (eh, not really)...Science assumes agency doesn't exist but it can't prove it. It's an axiom, and hence a choice.
Discussion of the preservation of media works: academic writing is not read by many people at the time but is preserved in libraries for a very long time, typically, podcasts feel like they are written on water.
I'm not sure if that's really true, some digital media is short-lived but audio recording formats are going to be reproducible for a long time. And the show is on Internet Archive) so is likely to be persisted as long as civilization doesn't collapse.