evolutionary biology

Wow! Spinoza!

Philosophy? Meh! So what does that feel like? You have to tune In. And here’s why…


Wow! Spinoza.
This week again short
but hopefully sweet. I take another run
at some of the ideas in contemporary Cognitive Science,
making a personal connection with what it feels like to think,
what it feels like to take on the ideas
of enlightenment philosopher Spinoza for example,
to understand them from our 21st Century frame
and to feel a physical
empathetic connection with them
even after they have been around for so many centuries.

We are after all embodied selves.
Perhaps it is time to make that part of our everyday rationale.

Philosophy? Meh! So what does that feel like?
Well, to find out
you have to tune In.
And here’s why…

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Narrative, What Narrative?

This week – Narrative, What Narrative? The story of a personal philosophical quest to found a moral basis for society.
Through the eyes of Descartes and Hume, our world view is seen as failing to describe the conditions required for a moral framework. This leads to our current parallel zeitgeist of despair and denial as described by Nietzsche as the inevitable consequence of the Enlightenment project.
It is seen to prove itself nothing more than an alternative to the God we killed with Western Enlightenment, to religion, and both are likened to stories, similar to many others in the grand scheme of things. Economics, Environment, Capital.
It matters not if the stories are true, only that they provide social cohesion, through the twin evolutionary drivers of social group belonging and linguistic sophistication.

This episode introduces the idea that these stories are fundamental to the way we think, and to the way we behave, but also explains how they are at the beck and call of our use of language. And therefore each and every one of us.
There is hope in that we control the narrative.
We need only decide on what it must do for us.

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American Inventors & The Cure For Extremism

Hi there and welcome.
This week a delve into Nationalism, Racism, Xenophobia, and Extremist Violence,
And claims that social media is to blame…
That we must curb the likes of Google and You Tube in order to stop it…

But wait a minute…
We had terrorism, and violence and hate speech
some time before the internet.
What’s going on?
What is really at the heart of it?
I’m Ant Biggs and you are listening to another can of worms.
This is COW – the Podcast.

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Tackling The Brain Hack – What’s Making You Tick?

Ant Biggs explores the cognitive, narrative landscape; A human condition of unavoidable complicity, as both hacker and hacked is exposed. A landscape full of danger that appears to be at the same time both difficult to escape but also one in which individuals may still yet claim full responsibility.

This is Episode 11 of COW – the podcast “Tracking The Brain Hack” in which as Yuval Noan Harari might say, the myths that frame our reality are revealed, the deep biological nature of our narrative landscape, the mechanisms that drive social adoption, evolution and extinction and the function of the individual in that dynamic process to show how we have been glued together, how our abilities have been turned into superpowers and how we have risen to great heights.

But we are more than static automata, simple products of our past. We are an ultimately adaptable species, able to switch from one narrative to another within a moment of evolutionary time.
Uniquely able to swap from niche to niche when required.

The trick is to know when the narratives that bind us, are no longer relevant.
And to know where these superpowers must take us…

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Beauty, Truth And the Eye of the Observer

This week a tangled web
and at the center of it
a place to come back to time and again.
a look at the world physics, and its recent history,
the quest to describe our physical reality
and a dip into the cognitive sciences
and evolutionary neurology
to point out how they might relate
to recent developments.
QBism for example,
a branch of Quantum Physics that’s attempting to rewrite the equations
from the position of a subjective observer.
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