See See by Ceci – Details, episodes & analysis

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See See by Ceci

Dr. Cecilia Ponce Rivera

Science

Society & Culture

Education

Frequency: 1 episode/18d. Total Eps: 57

See See is a podcast that looks in depth. With each season there is a new theme inquired multidimensionally. Whereas in the realms of science, the intellectual or the spiritual, each episode is a journey of exploration and discovery. See through our guests’ brilliant minds and inspiring life experiences. Their professional and human insight will allow you to see what they see. Embark yourself in an exciting adventure to see through the lenses of an artist, a scholar and researcher, a scientist, a psychologist, a philosopher, an entrepreneur, an activist, a dancer, and an endless list of possibilities that will invite you to see, rethink, relearn and deepen your perspective.

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Data updated on 14/07/2026

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Score global : 79%

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The Posthuman Mind Uncoupled: From Bacteria to AI with N. Katherine Hayles

Season 4 · Episode 9

Wednesday, June 10, 2026 • Duration 01:26:30

In this episode of See See by Ceci, N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA, James B. Duke Professor Emerita at Duke, Guggenheim Fellow and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, joins us from the rare crossroads at which she has worked for forty years: literature, science, technology and, now, artificial intelligence. Trained as a chemist at Rochester and Caltech before crossing into literary scholarship, she is a foremost authority on the relations between literature and computational media, and the author of How We Became Posthuman (1999) and, most recently, Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts (University of Chicago Press, 2025). In this rich and demanding conversation, Hayles redefines cognition as the interpretation of information in contexts that connect with meaning, a capacity she ascribes to bacteria, plants, fungi, animals and, increasingly, AI. She walks us through her integrated cognitive framework and the SIRAL criteria (sensing, interpreting, responding adaptively, anticipating, learning); through von Uexküll's umwelt, the world each species spins for itself; through cognitive assemblages in which humans, microbes and machines decide together; and through her sharp distinction between actors and agents. As a literary critic, she also turns her gaze on AI-produced literature, on hallucinations as imagination, and on Walter Benjamin's aura in the age of the deep fake. With reflections from neuroscientist John Cryan on the gut microbiome, historian Richard Bourke on the Kantian self, classicist Richard P. Martin on AI and imagination, and choreographer Alexander Whitley on embodiment. This is an episode about the uncoupling of cognition from consciousness, Hayles' most crucial move. About a posthuman in which the human itself is being rewritten. And about the very determined optimism of a thinker who insists that hope is not the reward at the end of the work, but the precondition for it. N. Katherine Hayles is the author of twelve influential books, including the landmark How We Became Posthuman, widely regarded as a seminal foundation for posthumanism, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005), Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (2017), and her latest, Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts (University of Chicago Press, 2025). A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller Foundation, Hayles has transformed our understanding of the digital age.

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Intelligence Without Brains with Toby Kiers

Season 4 · Episode 8

Wednesday, May 27, 2026 • Duration 01:40:24

In this episode of See See by Ceci, Toby Kiers, one of the world's most daring thinkers at the intersection of evolutionary biology, economics and ecology, takes us into the living web beneath our feet. University Research Chair and Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Tyler Prize laureate, MacArthur "genius" Fellow, Spinoza Prize winner and co-founder of SPUN, the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, Kiers has spent more than two decades asking the questions most of us never think to pose: How does a brainless organism make decisions? and, What is it like to be a fungus? In this rich and revelatory conversation, Kiers reflects on symbiosis as the hidden driver of evolution, from the first algae crawling onto land 450 million years ago to a soybean root in a Dutch laboratory today; on cheating as a force of innovation rather than a moral failure; on the exquisite sensitivity of fungal networks that respond to vibration, breath and light; on sanctions that are swift, severe and ingenious; on what she calls "punk science", research that crosses disciplines and refuses to accept the world as given; and on the humbling moment in Ecuador when members of the Sarayaku community listened to her describe her findings and replied: Of course this is happening. We knew this! This is part of our belief! She tells us about her team, the "underground astronauts" mapping the world beneath our feet, and about fungi as a "library of solutions" for a planet in crisis: a circulatory system that processes some 13 billion tons of carbon each year, roughly a third of all fossil fuel emissions. Along the way, we hear former Harvard neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander pose a question on the Cambrian explosion and evolutionary partnerships; we hear from Professor Katherine Hayles on the Umwelt, on actors and agents, and the uncoupling of consciousness from cognition; from ecologist Carl Safina on the cooperation between dolphins and fishermen and the worm's first aesthetic judgement; and from choreographer Alexander Whitley on the flow states that technology can both disrupt and reveal, each voice opening a new dimension of what it means to sense, to decide, and to belong on a living planet. This is an episode about the wonder beneath the soil: biological, strategic and ancient, namely the circulatory system that connects all life on earth. About the courageous shift in mindset to acknowledge the ground we walk on not as inert matter but as intelligent beings, capable of supporting universes above their own.

Beautiful Wild Minds with Carl Safina

Season 4 · Episode 7

Wednesday, May 13, 2026 • Duration 01:38:05

In this episode of See See by Ceci, Carl Safina, one of the world's most eloquent and mindful voices for the living Earth, MacArthur Fellowship laureate, and author of environmental classics including Beyond Words, Becoming Wild, and Alfie and Me, takes us on a journey across species and into the very nature of mind itself. Travel with us into the open ocean, the deep forest, and beyond, in the company of whales, wolves, elephants, and owls, and discover what consciousness looks like when we stop assuming it belongs only to us. Safina is the inaugural Endowed Professor for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University and founder of the Safina Center. As a scientist, he helped ban high-seas drift nets and reform U.S. fishing policy. For decades, he has been asking the questions most of us never think to pose: What is it like to be an elephant mourning a lost companion? How do sperm whale clans announce who they are in patterns of clicks as precise as Morse code? And what does a seven-year-old screech owl named Alfie, who still calls to the man who raised her, teach us about trust, love, and identity? In this wide-ranging and deeply moving conversation, Safina reflects on culture and de-extinction; on cognition that thinks in echolocation, intelligence that lives in a pod's shared memory, awareness that grieves, plans, plays, and recognizes itself in another. He considers why the most astonishing thing about animals is not what we discover about them but how estranged we have become from our own world, and dwells on beauty as a fundamental force in evolution, not an ornament added once the basics are in place, but the very thing that makes the basics worth having. This is an episode about kinship: biological, emotional, moral, and cognitive. About the courage to see the world not as ours to dominate but as a big family we all belong to.

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Mind’s Ancestral Gatekeepers with Terri Lyne Carrington

Season 4 · Episode 6

Wednesday, April 29, 2026 • Duration 01:28:24

What is it about rhythm that dissolves separation and draws us into a shared pulse? At the heart of this episode lies a quiet but unshakable conviction: that every life, every struggle, every creative breakthrough, is a quest for freedom. Few voices today carry that conviction with more authority than Terri Lyne Carrington, four-time Grammy winner, NEA Jazz Master, and one of the most vital figures in music of our time. In this conversation, she traces the search for freedom from its deepest roots to its most urgent expressions in the present. It begins with a child at a drum kit, and a family sensing something uncanny, a story that reaches back across generations, and across oceans, to a lineage in which rhythm was never only sound, but memory, identity, and a spiritual code passed through the hands of those entrusted to keep it alive. From there, Terri takes us into what jazz truly is at its core: a kind of liberation theology. Born of displacement and oppression, it became a communal act of survival, intellectual, radically creative, radically free. And it is in that freedom, expressed through improvisation, that something remarkable happens: boundaries begin to stretch, time itself begins to bend, and the music reaches far beyond those who first gave it voice. But as you'll discover, Terri is not only conscious of history, she is making it. Through the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, she is carrying that same liberating impulse into new territory, challenging the hyper-masculine structures that have shaped jazz for decades and opening doors for voices that might otherwise have gone unheard. With this, she brings music into some of the most urgent conversations of our time: gender equality, and the building of a truly universal legacy. A vibrant episode, infused with Terri's ancestral rhythm and potent intellect, in which she returns us to the essential elements of rhythm itself: its flow, its healing power, and its quiet, seductive pull into that spiritual place which is eternal: the present. Why drummers are the mind's gatekeepers, and what they are guarding that is so much greater than music itself, is what this episode invites you to discover.

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Digital Body: Mind, Tension, and Perception with Alexander Whitley

Season 4 · Episode 5

Tuesday, April 14, 2026 • Duration 01:25:52

Join us for a fascinating conversation with choreographer Alexander Whitley about how movement shapes consciousness and how technology transforms our perception of the world and of ourselves. In this episode, Alexander shares his vision of the body as a site of knowing and self-making. He calls it “auto-fabrication”, meaning we are continually creating ourselves through moving, sensing, perceiving, a process, he asserts, where there is creativity. As Artistic Director of the Alexander Whitley Dance Company, Alexander places live bodies in dialogue with digital systems, staging the tension between our physical, embodied existence and the disembodied way of experiencing the world that modern technologies introduce. He explores how our experience becomes fractured, distributed spatially and temporally, and how social media creates what he calls “jittery, schizoid intervals,” a constant interruption that breaks the flow of attention into fragmented, arrhythmic patterns. In this episode, he walks us through his productions: Antibody, on the transhumanist desire to transcend the body; Overflow, on the emotional impact of social media; Future Rites, a VR reimagining of The Rite of Spring; and his new work Mirror, inspired by Shannon Vallor’s The AI Mirror, which asks how much we absorb from what technology reflects back to us. Alex invites us to question the narratives that frame technology as either savior or destroyer, setting us into the grey area, where the real inquiry is. Be prepared to sit with a striking profound reflection: What becomes of the sensitive attunement between humans when screens mediate our bonds? Alexander reminds us that the mind is embodied, shaped by movement, rhythm, and connection. And that dance may be one of our most powerful tools for sensing what it means to be human.

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Mind is Matter: Function and Emotion with Paul Thagard

Season 4 · Episode 4

Wednesday, March 25, 2026 • Duration 01:44:55

In this episode of See See by Ceci, Paul Thagard, one of the most influential thinkers at the crossroads of philosophy, psychology, and artificial intelligence, takes us on a journey through the architecture of thought, emotion, and coherence that defines the human mind. A distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, recipient of the Killam and Molson Prizes, and author of eighteen books, Thagard has spent decades asking the hardest questions about intelligence: what it is, where it comes from, and whether machines will ever truly share it with us. His pioneering theory of explanatory coherence reimagines the brain not as a logic machine but as a coherence engine, a system that makes sense of the world by satisfying countless constraints simultaneously, weaving perception, reasoning, and emotion into a single fabric. In this wide-ranging conversation, Thagard reflects on the difference between intelligence and consciousness; on the devastating role of social media in the spread of misinformation; on the power of analogy as a tool of creativity, from Darwin's theory of natural selection to the everyday act of reading a stranger's gesture. And on why computers, despite their cognitive capacities, remain fundamentally psychopathic. "They are highly intelligent," he says, "but they lack empathy and are therefore incapable of caring." That incapacity sits at the heart of the episode's most urgent theme: the alarming rise of human-AI relationships, and what we risk losing when we mistake imitation for intimacy. Drawing on his recent book Dreams, Jokes, and Songs: How Brains Build Consciousness and the forthcoming AI Boom or Doom?, Thagard offers a remarkably clear-eyed view of minds both human and artificial, one that is at once scientifically rigorous and deeply humane. This is an episode about the mind as a coherence engine: hot and cold, rational and emotional, individual and social. About how neurons firing together can produce something as extraordinary as humor, as mysterious as dreams, and as dangerous as political delusion. And about the light, and the peril, that lies ahead as human and artificial intelligence continue to converge.

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Timeless Mind Space with Domingo Milella

Season 4 · Episode 3

Wednesday, March 4, 2026 • Duration 01:40:32

What happens when a photographer trades the vast clarity of Mediterranean ruins for the darkness of a prehistoric cave? In this episode of See See by Ceci, visionary Italian artist Domingo Milella takes us on a journey that spans forty thousand years and the full depth of the human spirit. Milella first made his name with luminous large-format photographs of ancient landscapes, the coast of Puglia, the ruins of Petra, the pyramids of Egypt, images of extraordinary stillness that invited the viewer to slow down and breathe. Yet beneath the surface of that early success, a quiet crisis was gathering. In the summer of 2014, at the age of thirty-three, his carefully constructed world collapsed. He retreated to a forgotten village on the Ionian Sea, carrying only two things: his large-format camera and a copy of Moby Dick. Both remained untouched, the camera locked in a cupboard, the book unopened on the nightstand. What followed was a passage through despair and into transformation. Through therapy and the slow archaeology of the self, Milella found his way to the prehistoric caves. There, in total darkness, surrounded by ochre symbols and handprints inscribed tens of thousands of years ago, something shifted. The camera obscura he carried into those narrow tunnels became a mirror of the cave itself: both dark chambers in which images are born from minerals, water and light. In this rich and deeply personal conversation, Milella reflects on darkness as a space of safety and revelation rather than fear; on the intimate connection between memory, the body and the imagination; on the silent pressure of the digital age and its relentless flood of images; and on the nameless, collective authorship that links a teenager’s graffiti in a city alleyway to a Paleolithic painter working by torchlight four hours from the sun. What emerges is a meditation on time that refuses to move in one direction, where a feverish child navigating the folds of a bedsheet, an artist kneeling with a mammoth-format camera in a narrow tunnel, and an unknown hand pressing ochre against stone forty thousand years ago are all part of the same gesture. This is an episode about caves: geological, photographic and interior. About the courage it takes to descend into one’s own depths. And about the treasure that waits there: not answers, but the oldest and most enduring questions of what it means to be human.

Embodied Cognition: The Music Within with Vijay Iyer

Season 4 · Episode 2

Wednesday, February 18, 2026 • Duration 01:37:42

Let yourself be drawn into the world of one of the most prolific, shape- shifting presences in 21st century music. Vijay Iyer is a Grammy-nominated composer, pianist, bandleader, and the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University. He is a MacArthur Fellow, described by The New York Times as “a social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway.” In a profound conversation, Vijay Iyer takes us on a journey of discovery, into what embodied cognition truly means and where music begins. He invites us to explore the extraordinary phenomenon of synchrony: how musicians lock into pulse together, and how an entire audience can exhale as one at the close of a performance. Iyer speaks of live music as a form of ritual, a collective agreement to step out of everyday life and into something else, together. He also reflects with great warmth on his collaborations with artists such as the drummer Tyshawn Sorey and the legendary trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, describing the deep listening, humility, and compassion that make their music possible. He opens our eyes to think deeply about jazz, “not as style of music but an act of freedom.” Music, he insists, should truly be listened to as a human action, asking ourselves who made it, where they were, and how they found each other. This episode is a powerful and loving reminder that music is, first and foremost, a live, shared, visceral, mutually embodied experience, and that within it lies the recognition of a deep longing we carry always: to come back to the experience of that timeless space where two souls meet in the act of listening.

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The First Leap to Consciousness with Paul Bahn & Elle Clifford

Season 4 · Episode 1

Wednesday, February 4, 2026 • Duration 01:56:45

In this episode of See See by Ceci, we journey hundreds of thousands of years into the past, to the flickering firelight and painted depths of Ice Age caves. What did it mean to live embedded in the landscape, wearing it “like a big cape”? How did the mastery of fire reshape not only our bodies but our minds? And what can we learn from the haunting images left deep within caves—some meant to be seen, others engraved in darkness, never intended for any eye but the spirit world? From the earliest trace of aesthetic awareness, a pebble that looked like a face, carried home, to dots, stencils, animals, geometric forms and so much more, we explore how symbolic culture emerged not from necessity but from play, imagination, and the suspension of ordinary reality. We consider how caves themselves became spaces of meditation and transformation, how music and birdsong may have shaped early consciousness, and what these first leaps into abstraction reveal about the origins of art, religion, and the human mind itself. In conversation with Paul Bahn one of the world’s leading authorities on prehistoric rock art, Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and author of over one hundred publications including the award-winning Images of the Ice Age, and Elle Clifford, psychologist and researcher specializing in Ice Age life whose work on cave art and mythological worlds illuminates the social and psychological dimensions of our earliest ancestors. Co-hosted by acclaimed Italian landscape photographer Domingo Milella, this episode invites us to stand face to face with those who came before, and to see ourselves reflected in the first marks they left behind.

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Trailer Season 4 (Mind)

Season 4 · Episode 1

Wednesday, January 21, 2026 • Duration 03:54

What is the mind? Where does it begin, and where does it end? Season IV of See See by Ceci takes you on a 16-episode journey through the mysteries of consciousness: from the first spark of awareness in prehistoric caves to the frontiers of AI and the future of human identity. Featuring Harvard neuroscientist Rudolph Tanzi on Alzheimer’s and the self, psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist on the divided brain, Pulitzer finalist Andrew Solomon on the shadows of the mind, global mental health pioneer Vikram Patel, and trauma specialist Richard Mollica on invisible wounds and healing. We explore intelligence beyond the human: Toby Kiers reveals the hidden networks of fungal intelligence, Carl Safina takes us into the beautiful wild minds of animals. Jazz visionary Vijay Iyer shows us the music within embodied cognition, while four-time Grammy winning drummer, producer and conceptualist Terri Lyne Carrington explores rhythm as the mind’s ancestral gatekeeper. Philosopher Katherine Hayles traces the posthuman mind from bacteria to AI, Stephen Cave examines intelligence and immortality, and neurosurgeon Eben Alexander shares what lies beyond, when the mind becomes unbound. From choreographer Alexander Whitley on digital bodies to photographer Domingo Milella on caves as timeless mind spaces, and archaeologists Paul Bahn and Elle Clifford on humanity’s first leap to consciousness. At a moment when technology is reshaping who we are, when mental health has become a global reckoning, and when the boundaries between human and artificial intelligence blur, we ask: what awaits our species? And what kind of mind will carry us forward?

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See See by Ceci – Details, episodes & analysis

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See See by Ceci – Details, episodes & analysis

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