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PODCAST

Headless Deep Dive Podcast

HeadlessDeepDive.substack.com

Exploring the intersection of the Headless Way with the worlds of Philosophy, Science, and Religion. I like to use Artificial Intelligence to reflect back to us what humanity looks like from another point of view. This podcast is a feed of the Deep Dive podcast generated by Google"s Notebook LM customized with handpicked content just for the Headless Deep dive audience. headlessdeepdive.substack.com

society & culture philosophy

All Episodes

5:50

Martin Buber - I and Thou

Headless Deep Dive Podcast ·

2025/10/11

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 past, experiencing a world of separateness and objectification, which makes us feel like another thing

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22:27

Brentyn Ramm - Body, Self and Others

Headless Deep Dive Podcast ·

2025/09/23

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 intersubjectivity.I love the way this paper looks at the problem of how it is that we all have our own private view of

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13:29

Merleau-Ponty - The Visible and the Invisible

Headless Deep Dive Podcast ·

2025/09/01

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 topic, Merleau-Ponty adopts a similar first-person science perspective as Douglas Harding. For instance,

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15:02

Seth - The sense of "me"

Headless Deep Dive Podcast ·

2025/08/10

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 this that stand out to me are that I don’t perceive a given world and passively take it in as it is.

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13:06

Bertrand Russell - The ABC's of Relativity

Headless Deep Dive Podcast ·

2025/05/26

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 separate dimensions of space and time but rather one has to consider a combined fabric of spacetime. A

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4:04

Douglas Harding - My Special Friend

Headless Deep Dive Podcast ·

2025/04/19

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 “You Darling” is starting to look pretty old and the narrator needs to decide… am I dying too?Douglas

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20:22

Schrödinger - Universal Consciousness

Headless Deep Dive Podcast ·

2025/04/07

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 multiplicity is only apparent, in truth there is only one mind.”I decided to have a conversation with AI about this

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16:05

The Touched Self - Ciaunica and Fotopoulou

Headless Deep Dive Podcast ·

2025/02/08

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 contribute to the sense of being a separate self. Simalarly, Ciaunica and Fotopoulou describe how the sense

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15:05

Daniel Kolak - I Am You

Headless Deep Dive Podcast ·

2025/01/19

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 and provides the best metaphysical basis for global ethics.“But we sure seem separate”, one might say.

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13:48

John Wheeler's Participatory Universe

Headless Deep Dive Podcast ·

2024/12/31

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 observed, but that we can delay our choice in whether to observe it and then after making the choice, the

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9:31

Whitehead - Adventures in Ideas

Headless Deep Dive Podcast ·

2024/12/15

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 experience as a process where we don't simply "make things happen" - rather, we are constituted by how we

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10:48

David Hume - A Treatise of Human Nature

Headless Deep Dive Podcast ·

2024/12/08

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 ideas are “faint images” of impressions. Being an empiricist, Hume argues that we can find no concrete

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9:11

Daniel Dennett - Where Am I?

Headless Deep Dive Podcast ·

2024/12/02

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 experience happening thru the body? There are no easy answers to these questions, but this was a

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16:27

Douglas Hofstadter - Analogy as the Core of Cognition

Headless Deep Dive Podcast ·

2024/12/01

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 in language and the way we sometimes get tripped up and mix metaphors or blend words together points to

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17:53

Julian Jaynes - Consciousness and the Voices of the Mind

Headless Deep Dive Podcast ·

2024/11/30

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 what this inner model of the world is like. But Jaynes also says this has not always been the case. He

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12:29

Leibniz - Monadology

Headless Deep Dive Podcast ·

2024/11/24

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 perspective) you have to observe me from every possible angle and every possible distance, with every

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12:44

Bernardo Kastrup - Analytic Idealism

Headless Deep Dive Podcast ·

2024/11/11

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 appear to have our own individual consciousnesses. It is not that we are separate individuals with our own

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15:26

Stephen Wolfram - On the Nature of Time

Headless Deep Dive Podcast ·

2024/11/09

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 spearheading a project called The Wolfram Physics Project where they have been building a model of the

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15:41

Michael Graziano - Attention Schema Theory

Headless Deep Dive Podcast ·

2024/11/04

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 Attention Schema Theory (AST). In his paper, called A Conceptual Framework of Consciousness, Graziano

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9:44

Carlo Rovelli's Relational Quantum Mechanics

Headless Deep Dive Podcast ·

2024/11/02

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 Dorato in his paper Rovelli’s Relational Quantum Mechanics, Anti-Monism, and Quantum Becoming.My key

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29 results

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