Headless Deep Dive Podcast

When we look back at our lives, we experience a highlight reel of sorts, all the memorable good and bad experiences and this cinematic metaphor extends into thinking of ourselves as a fixed snapshot: I’m angry, I’m happy, etc. Henri Bergson reminds us that we are not a finished product, we are a process. We are not snapshots, we are a continuing ever-changing flow of experience. In his book Creative Evolution, Bergson uses many metaphors to snap us out of this fixed and separated mindset:* A snowball “continually swelling with the duration which it accumulates”* A "bud" sprouted from its parents, remaining united to the "totality of living beings by invisible bonds"* An embroidery canvas passed from ancestor to descendant; as the "ancestor passes on" the canvas, each descendant adds their own "original embroidery" to the shared historyand my favorite:* A musical theme existing as a whole despite its variations. The individual represents a unique expression of the broader current of life. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit headlessdeepdive.substack.com

Today, we go back to the roots of the Headless Deep Dive and look at chapter one of Douglas Harding’s book: The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth. There is a fantastic new-ish website which serves as an archive for much of Douglas’s material, where this chapter can be found among many other things like his original handwritten notes, and various photos, etc. The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth, is Douglas Harding’s philosophical masterpiece where he seeks to answer the question “What am I”? Chapter One of the book gives us the simple, yet not intuitive, two-fold answer. What I am for myself is wide open capacity for all the sights, sounds, feelings, thoughts and emotions that fill my first-person point of view. What I am for others depends on the range of that other observer. At a certain range I am a person. Closer up, I am cells and molecules. Further away I am a town, a country, a planet, a star or a galaxy. We spend so much time in our youth learning to be a member of the human club, that we forgot that is only one of the clubs we could belong to. Looking out at the night sky and pointing at Andromeda, I see my multi-layered self and can identify any of those layers with the same open center. I can identify my human self with that pointing hand I see, my earthly self with the moon I see, my solar self with the other stars I see and my Milky-way self with Andromeda. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit headlessdeepdive.substack.com

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 the world and yet we all agree at some level about what is happening “out there”. In this paper, Ramm walks thru Merleau-Ponty’s views on the merged body-subject where subject and body are inseparable, the notion of Sartre's “Look” where our own self-consciousness comes from the gaze of others, and (my personal favorite) Harding’s explanation that “mind” is the view-out and “body” is the view-in.By walking through some of Harding’s experiments, Ramm also shows the reader how to see for themselves that the view-out is nothing but spaciousness encompassing the whole world, while simultaneously the view-in from another’s perspective is a small and limited body (at least at the range of a few feet or so). I find this to be an elegant solution to the mind-body problem — there is no problem. We don’t have to solve the question of how a “mind” can spring up from a “body” when we realize that mind and body are two different points of view on the same phenomenon. Or as Douglas Harding puts it: My mind is your body, and my body is your mindI hope you enjoy listening to this one and follow along with the experiments to see for yourself whether this is true for you. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit headlessdeepdive.substack.com

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. I predict what the world will be and then adjust my predictions constantly. Similarly, I don’t “have” a self that I’m sensing, I’m predicting a self as a way of regulating the many processes involved in staying alive as an organism. In this way the sense of “self” is like other senses, it is something I am predicting will occur and I’m constantly experiencing the prediction.The feeling of being "me" is what I think it would feel like if I actually were a "me", whatever that is. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit headlessdeepdive.substack.com

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 Harding would suggest that one in the mirror is only what you look like at a certain range - only one of your appearances. Check out this experiment to see for yourself.The one in the mirror will surely age and die, yes. The open capacity, the aware presence we are looking out of has no birth date and no death date. It just is what is happening right now. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit headlessdeepdive.substack.com

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 of touch and interoception contribute to building the notion of being a separate self.From birth, and even before birth, the sense of touch is flooding us with incoming information about the world. Along with touch, we have interoception - the awareness of our internal states like hunger, discomfort, etc. These senses, along with predictive processing of our brains contribute to our sense of self from the earliest stages of life.Let's break that down a bit further:The Shift from Undifferentiated Sensation to Self-Other Distinction* Before: Initially, it's theorized that the infant likely experiences a more undifferentiated flow of sensations. There's no clear separation between internal bodily states and external sensations such as sights, sounds, and smells. Everything is just "out there," without a defined sense of "me" experiencing them. There's a feeling of "arousal" or "seeking" but not a "mine" that experiences them.* Through Interactions: The key shift comes from the consistent and patterned interactions with caregivers. The caregiver's actions act as a consistent external factor that influences internal interoceptive states. This allows the infant to start to notice correlations and relationships.* Establishing the Boundary:* The infant begins to perceive, for example, that the feeling of fullness arises in correlation with the caregiver feeding them, or that a feeling of comfort is correlated with being held. This creates a pattern: actions from another body (the caregiver) consistently correlate with changes within their body.* Importantly, the infant learns that when their bodies initiate actions (e.g., crying), it does not automatically and consistently regulate their internal states. Rather, their interoceptive states are much more likely to be regulated through the actions of another person.* The difference between these "within" and "on" sensations, combined with the difference between actions that are controlled internally, and actions that come externally, starts to create a basic understanding of the boundary between "me" and "not me".My big takeaway from this is that the “self”, the “me”, the “I” is perhaps not some entity that was always there or somehow got attached to the body, rather it is the embodied experience itself which forms the mental construct of a “self” as we learn to model our own agency and learn how to navigate this world. Also, and this is key, we don’t do this on our own. It is through the care and touch of others that we come to be ourselves. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit headlessdeepdive.substack.com

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 electron will behave accordingly. Quantum strangeness like that implies that we as observers have a definite role in shaping the “reality” around us.Wheeler used the analogy of a letter R (for reality) made of papier-mâché where there are definite iron post observations that mark out the structure of reality, but we fill in the rest with our own theories based on those observations.But aren’t we a part of reality as well? In a way, yes, our human appearance is also a part of the reality we observe. In that way, Wheeler said, we are participating in our own creation. And this participation is not just on our own mental scale, but Wheeler says it extends to the whole universe as observed by all observers. Wheeler drew this iconic picture of the universe looking back at itself to illustrate his point. The Big Bang is the top right of the picture where the universe “U” then expands and ultimately creates observers (represented by the eyeball at top left) which can then look back at the whole history of the universe and thereby bring it into a sort of papier-mâché being.We play this role for the universe. We get what we look for. Looking down, I find a torso, arms and legs and the earth at my feet. Directing my attention to where those arms and legs and earth are sticking out of, I see just pure nothingness, the source where all that creation comes from and the subject which is the observer of that creation. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit headlessdeepdive.substack.com

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 permanent entity called “the self”. Instead of we have a “bundle” of perceptions which we then connect together in an attempt to understand those events in terms of cause and effect. This forms the idea of the self to explain what happened. He uses the idea of a republic as an analogy for our idea of a self. Just as a republic is the idea of a collection of common persons with similar coordinated behavior, the self is likewise an idea arising from our bundle of perceptions.This reminds me of the phrase “the united cellular republic” that Douglas Harding uses sometimes as one way to describe what a person is. Tying Hume and Harding’s ideas together, I would say we are a cellular republic which refers to itself as “me”, “myself”, and “I”. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit headlessdeepdive.substack.com

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 the deep role analogy plays in our cognition. He suggests that perhaps it might be analogy all the way down. In a future episode we will further explore the role of analogy in Hofstadter’s “strange loop” concept and how building up a series of analogies eventually leads us to having a sense of “self”. But for today, enjoy this talk about how analogy plays a deep role in our thinking process. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit headlessdeepdive.substack.com

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 possible sort of sensory apparatus. This corresponds to the way Leibniz describes looking at the same town from different sides. Each monad has its own distinct perception of the universe, but they all ultimately reflect the same universe. So each of us, in our own way, contains the whole universe as a living reflection of the whole universe. Though we may seem limited due to our limited perspective, in our very essence we are all whole and complete, lacking nothing.“Now this connexion or adaptation of all created things to each and of each toall, means that each simple substance has relations which express all the others,and, consequently, that it is a perpetual living mirror of the universe”. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit headlessdeepdive.substack.com

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 universe based on computation.The way I think of this model is that there is what Wolfram calls “The Ruliad” which is the set of all possible rules for all possible universes, and then there is a huge dataset where every point of space exists and gets updated by running through the rules, or actually, running through all possible rules and then getting all possible points of space. We, as observers, are or course included in all that exists as well and we see our section of this process that is local to our section of space unfolding according to our section of all possible rules.But what is time? In this article, Wolfram describes that as these rules unfold and are computed we see the “future” unfolding before our eyes as the next set of states for everything that exists. However, since our brains can only compute at a certain rate and that rate is much smaller than the rate of everything unfolding in the ruliad computations, we end up with summarized snapshots of the universe that unfold before us like a movie made of so many images per second instead of as a stream of countless bits of information.Wolfram summarizes it as follows:“In our everyday life we’re typically looking at scenes involving objects that are perhaps tens of meters away from us. And given the speed of light that means photons from these objects get to us in less than a microsecond. But it takes our brains milliseconds to register what we’ve seen. And this disparity of timescales is what leads us to view the world as consisting of a sequence of states of space at successive moments in time. If our brains “ran” a million times faster (i.e. at the speed of digital electronics) we’d perceive photons arriving from different parts of a scene at different times, and we’d presumably no longer view the world in terms of overall states of space existing at successive times.”So according to this theory, it seems that time is just what it feels like to see one snapshot after another in a certain sequence. We are starring in, and projecting the movie of our lives. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit headlessdeepdive.substack.com

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 takeaways from this paper were:* Things are defined by their interactions with other things and have no inherent properties of their own* A system cannot know itself fully and therefore the universe as a whole is unknowable…. “everything” is in many ways identical with “no-thing”.* We all have our own timeline and our own view from “here” that serves as a “local becoming”. In a way, our point of view is our universe.One quote that really jumped out at me that was not even one from Carlo Rovelli. It was this quote from Julian Barbour:“if we want to get a true idea of what a point of space-time is like we should look outward at the universe…The complete notion of a point of space-time in fact consists of the appearance of the entire universe as seen from that point.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit headlessdeepdive.substack.com