Headless Deep Dive Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

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 prehend (take in and feel) what is given to us from the past. Whitehead calls the process of “concrescence” as the way these prehensions come together to form a new unity which he calls the “superject”.

Whitehead uses the term “ingression” to describe how eternal objects (potentialities) and past actual occasions enter into and shape the becoming of each new moment of experience. We don't stand apart from experience and "make" it - we are made by it.

Whitehead reverses the traditional subject-object relationship. Instead of a stable subject that acts on or perceives objects, he sees subjects as emerging from the process of experiencing. The experiencer and the experience arise together. This also relates to what Whitehead calls "creativity" - the ultimate principle by which "the many become one and are increased by one." The "many" (all the past occasions and potentials) come together to create each new occasion of experience, which then becomes part of the "many" for future occasions.

We, and all of reality, are like a river. A constant flow of becoming, always changing, always new.

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”.

The physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (for whom the unit of velocity as compared to the speed of sound was named), brings us today’s episode, based on his book: The Analysis of Sensations. In this book, March argues that our understanding of the world is based on our sensations and that physical objects are merely thought-symbols for complex combinations of these sensations. Mach rejects the distinction between mind and matter, and emphasizes the economical nature of science, suggesting that scientific theories should be as simple and efficient as possible.

This view of the world is very well represented in Mach’s famous “self portrait” where he depicts “himself” as his visual field of view. This radical approach says that, yes, 3rd party observers would paint a portrait of us as a person with a head, arms and legs (assuming that observer were at a distance of a few feet away) — but for ourselves, what we see is what we are at the moment. Mach argues that the series of first-person perceptions which we have throughout our lives is what we use the shortcut/symbol “I” to mean, even though the person we were as a baby and the person we are now are clearly very different looking and having very different experiences.

Thanks to the recommendation of a friend at book club, I bring you today’s episode which instead of being based on an article, is based on a YouTube video of a presentation by researcher Chris Fields entitled What Are Our Bodies?

Have you been feeling old lately? Well, guess what? You are a lot older than you think. According to Fields, our bodies are part of one single body that is 4,000,000,000 years old. Not only that, it means that we share that body with every other living thing on the planet. It really makes one question the notion of “self” and “other”.

The Three Dialogues, written in 1713 by George Berkeley lays out his philosophy of “indeterminism” via a series of dialogues between two characters: Hylas (representing common sense) and Philonous (representing Berkeley as the philosopher). This writing style may have been an inspiration for the approach Douglas Harding takes in parts of the Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth as a device to argue against conventional ways of thinking.

Berkeley argues that there are nothing but “sensible” objects perceived in a mind and that the notion of “matter” which is somehow outside of mind does not make any sense (literally and figuratively). In fact, says Berkeley, the “things” which we sense are actually the redness, sweetness, and roundness which, in language, we commonly refer to as an “apple”. Ultimately, Berkeley (who was a bishop in the Anglican Church of Ireland) uses this chain of logic as a proof that God exists — for how else could there be things outside of our individual human minds, if they were not in the mind of God.

p.s. I get a kick out of how this painting of Berkeley looks like he is doing one of Harding’s pointing experiments.

The NotebookLM tool that I use to generate these podcasts just got an upgrade which allows me to provide input to the “hosts” as to how they approach their discussion. This allows me to now indicated that this podcast is called the Headless Deep Dive and is targeted to those interested in the Headless Way. I’m thrilled with the outcome and I hope you are too.

Today’s episode is based on the Essays in Radical Empiricism by the psychologist and philosopher William James. James focuses on the importance and primacy of the unending stream of experience that we commonly refer to as “consciousness”. However, he does so in a way so as to be clear that there are not two things (consciousness and the world) but rather there is just the stream of experience. Interestingly he connects breathing to the development of the idea that there is a separate thing called “consciousness”:

…breath, which was ever the original of ‘spirit,’ breath moving outwards, between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as consciousness. That entity is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are.

The argument goes that while noticing the breath and other “internal” sensations like thoughts along with the rest of the experiences going on at the same time, we develop an intuition that there is an “inside” and “outside” — a “me” and “the world”. James argues that this is just a mistaken impression and there is only what he calls “pure experience”.

If the sense of being a “me” is an illusion, where does it come from? That’s a topic that Professor Jay Garfield covers in today’s article called: Second Persons and the Constitution of the First Person. In the article, Garfield cites the work of developmental psychologist Vasudevi Reddy, who emphasizes the role of dyadic (two-way) interactions in infants and the way these interactions contribute to the development of self-understanding. Apparently, even before language develops, the interactions we have with other people creates a you-me relationship and hence the sense of “me” begins to develop.

Reflecting on this point of view, I do see how other third persons are like objects moving through the world - sights and sounds to be seen. But when those third persons turn their attention towards “me”, then the feeling arises of “what are you looking at?”. If I go looking for what they are looking at, all I see is the world along with the thought that I am looking at the world. So when it comes to duality, you and I are in this together.

Today’s article is called HOW AND WHY CONSCIOUSNESS ARISES: SOME CONSIDERATIONS FROM PHYSICS AND PHYSIOLOGY by Mark Solms and Karl Friston.

What I find fascinating about this paper is the detailed description of the active inference process used by us humans, and other intelligences, to model the world, predict what it is we should be sensing and then either adjust those predictions based on prediction errors that come back from the next set of sensations or take action to gather more input. All of this is done while also paying attention based on “affect” or the “felt sense of uncertainty” , as the authors put it, in order to guide what is salient in this moment that we should actually be paying attention to .

In a sense we are living in a projected reality based on our predictions of the “outside” environment but this is where it gets really interesting. What is “inside” and what is “outside”? The paper speaks of interoception, or the sense of our “inner states” like our heart rate, but as I began to think about it, what makes the sense of my heart rate any different than the sense of the ticking clock on the wall? The definition of “inner” and “outer”, “self” and “environment” is entirely a defined by a specific point of view and is somewhat of a moving target.

Look at your own perceptions right now. What I find in my view is sights, sounds, feelings, and thoughts all of which are presumably my environment, or at best something I have, since it is “I” who has them. Today’s paper argues that this intuition of “I” is also one of those things I am predicting along with the sights, sounds, feeling and thoughts. Wow.

Today’s article, Predicting green: really radical (plant) predictive processing by Paco Calvo and Karl Friston reveals that plants, like animals, engage in predictive processing - a fundamental aspect of intelligence involving predictions and evidence-gathering to minimize surprise and uncertainty.

Despite lacking a central nervous system, plants demonstrate intelligence through adaptive behaviors, predicting future conditions and adjusting their growth patterns accordingly. I found this to be amazing.

Humans also generate internal models of the world, comparing predictions with sensory data and adjusting beliefs and actions to minimize discrepancies. I find that this process creates a sense of separation between self and environment and a constant striving to align reality with expectations.

However, Douglas Harding's Headless Way provides a complementary viewpoint. Harding invites us to notice that at the center of our experience - where we assume our head to be - there is actually a vast, boundless awareness. This awareness is the space in which all sensations, thoughts, and predictions occur.

Harding's insights remind us that there's more to our nature than prediction and adaptation. We are also the vast, open awareness in which all of life's predictions and surprises play out - a truth we can directly experience here and now.

By integrating these perspectives, we can navigate life with both the wisdom of our adaptive, predictive nature and the freedom of boundless awareness. Editors Note: True to the nature of the Headless Deep dive I worked with Claude.ai to help me draft this article.

Michael Levin is one of my favorite scientists. He and his collaborators are working in the area of biology and cognition with a framework he calls the Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere (TAME), which I find to be very much compatible with eastern philosophy and the Headless Way.

One of the most mind blowing papers is Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence. This paper struck a chord with me as both someone who is interested in Buddhist-type philosophy and someone who is interested in AI. The concept Cognitive Light Cones introduced in this paper as a way of describing the depth and breadth of what an intelligence cares about is an idea that should be at the forefront of AI research as we bring new intelligences into the world. It seems rather obvious that we would want those new intelligences to care about us and the things we care about as well.

More than that though, this paper got me thinking about “care” as a fundamental quality behind everything we experience. What we experience — what we see, hear, feel, smell, taste, and think — is optimized and shaped by evolution to be what we care about. It is those aspects of the world that we find salient to our own existence and thus when I see the world I see what I care about. It brings a new flavor to everything. There is care, love and compassion underscoring all experience.

It is not about preferences, or approval or disapproval of what I experience. The mere fact that I experience it means I care for it. Now that puts a new spin on those annoying people and situations in life. So-and-so may really tick me off, but I experience their words and actions because deep down I care about other people and what they say. I may not agree with them or approve of their actions but I can’t help but care about them. Caring comes before any judgements are made. Caring is what lets them in to my awareness in the first place.

I hope you enjoy this episode of Headless Deep Dive as much as I did.