Micah Zarin Podcast

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In this episode I sat down with philosopher Simon Critchley, professor at the New School for Social Research and author of Mysticism, alongside my co-host Denis Calos. We got into what it means to live a mystical life, why growing up is the abdication of ecstasy, whether AI-generated music can be art, why suffering might be the precondition for making anything good, and why everyone wants to be the type of person who reads Nietzsche without actually reading Nietzsche. Also soccer, Suno, the Beatles, and me attempting German. If you like this kind of thing, I write longer essays on philosophy and consciousness on my Substack: https://substack.com/@micahzarin Subscribe for more long-form conversations with philosophers, scientists, and people thinking seriously about hard problems. CHAPTERS 00:00 Intros 01:05 Mysticism 07:29 The abdication of ecstasy 15:46 Is thinking play? 18:06 Songwriting 24:21 AI music 40:05 Reality privilege 46:59 Suffering 52:26 Analytic vs continental 1:02:24 Overthinking 1:18:10 LARPing 1:32:33 Advice Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: CO3NUX8TBBKHZNLN

00:00 What makes something creative 00:42 Intros 01:51 Can anything be truly novel? (psychological vs historical creativity) 05:05 Influence vs originality, and music lawsuits 09:34 Originality isn't enough 11:01 Discovery vs creativity 15:04 Combinatorial vs transformational creativity 19:14 Can AI be creative? 25:19 Word salad 30:28 Does a painting have value if no one ever sees it? 31:32 Is Baby Shark better than Beethoven? 37:31 Creativity and culture 42:27 Philosophy 49:51 Is anything in the world without creativity? 54:38 Is translation a creative act? 1:00:07 Adaptation vs inspiration 1:03:36 Life advice

Karl Friston — the world’s most-cited neuroscientist and architect of the Free Energy Principle — joins me for a conversation about how brains make sense of reality, why we seek uncertainty, what beauty is, why psychedelics dissolve our usual models of the world, etc We talk about predictive processing, active inference, surprise, Bayesian belief updating, jokes, curiosity, trauma, beauty, psychedelics, and the strange possibility that life itself is a kind of controlled hallucination. Read my Substack essay that frames part of this conversation: Beauty is a Loophole https://micahzarin.substack.com/p/bea... 0:00 — Karl Friston cold open 0:36 — Intro 1:04 — The Free Energy Principle, briefly 7:20 — Technical neuroscience 27:10 —jokes 33:33 — Curiosity 38:19 — uncertainty 48:24 — Goblins 52:40 — Psychedelics 1:13:31 — Awe, beauty, trauma, and dissolving old models 1:38:10 — Curiosity 1:41:29 — Karl Friston’s life advice

good video. subscribe and like if u enjoyed. dislike if u disenjoyed. lance:‪@lanceindependent‬ lance substack: https://substack.com/@lanceindependent 00:00 Cold open & intro 00:38 Why moral realists annoy him 06:56 Arguments for moral realism 15:04 Philosophy 38:22 Why anti-realists get misrepresented 45:55 “So slavery isn’t wrong?” 50:43 The magic beans fallacy 54:49 Moral reasoning and reality 57:24 Authenticity, cancellation, and tribalism 1:03:05 Productive disagreement in real life 1:06:01 Why care about philosophy? 1:17:19 Advice for studying philosophy 1:20:46 Life advice 1:24:29 Closing