David and Tamler take the first excursion into the work of Haruki Murakami and talk about his short story “Sleep.” A thirty-year-old woman, the wife of a dentist and mother of a young boy, has a terrifying dream and when she wakes up, she no longer needs to sleep. This isn’t insomnia, it’s something else – she has never felt so alive, strong, and awake. She can swim laps for an hour in the afternoon and read Anna Karenina with perfect concentration until dawn. What is this condition? Is it real? What does it tell us about her past, her sense of self, her alienation from friends, family, and her role? This is a banger of a story folks, check it out.

Plus - if you had to say one word or sentence to distinguish yourself from an AI, what would you say?

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Links:

• One word Turing test
• The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami

The great Paul Bloom returns to the show to explore the many mysteries of Todd Field’s 2022 film “Tár.” Is it a ghost story? A movie about cancel culture and abuse of power? Guilt? Professional disappointment? The anxiety of getting old, losing touch with youth and reality? Reminds me of my freshman year at Smith…

Plus – Paul gets into trouble on Twitter for saying he’s mildly pro-trigger warnings in certain cases. But is he ignoring the science???

Special Guest: Paul Bloom.

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Links:

• Paul Bloom on Twitter: "I agree with this decision-nobody should force profs to use trigger warnings. But I'm mildly pro-TW and have used them in the past. It's often basic decency to warn people--and this includes students--before exposing them to shocking material. https://t.co/ap8gxHgsp8" / Twitter
• Tár - Wikipedia

David and Tamler talk about William James’ chapter on mysticism from his book "Varieties of Religious Experience." What defines a mystical experience? Why do they defy expression and yet feel like a state of knowledge, a glimpse into the window of some undiscovered aspect of reality? Is Tamler right that David has a little mystic inside of him just waiting to burst forth from his breast?

Plus – another edition of VBW does conceptual analysis and we’re sticking with ‘c’ words – this time the definitive theory of ‘creepy.’

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Links:

• The Varieties of Religious Experience - Wikipedia
• The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature by William James [Project Gutenberg Free e-book]

David and Tamler deliver a PODCAST episode, one of many that comes from the INTERNET, that you’ll probably listen to through Air Pods or some other kind of WIRELESS HEADPHONES as you go about your day.

(Incidentally, the topic of the episode is Marshall McLuhan on how new forms of media profoundly shape our experience and identity, but in a way that makes us focus on the content of the specific medium and not the medium itself.)

Plus, can algorithms help to optimize our well-being, and Steven Pinker transforms his ideas into a new asset class of NFTs.

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Links:

• Best-Selling Author & Harvard Professor Steven Pinker Will Transform His Ideas into NFTs | Blockster
• I Asked an Algorithm to Optimize My Life. Here's What Happened | WIRED
• The Medium is the Message by Marshall McLuhan
• Marshall McLuhan - Wikipedia
• Marshall McLuhan Interview from Playboy (1969)

Here’s an episode with something for both of us – a healthy serving of Kantian rationalism for David with a dollop of Marxist criminology for Tamler. We discuss and then argue about Jeffrie Murphy’s 1971 paper “Marxism and Retribution.” For Murphy, utilitarianism is non-starter as a theory of punishment because it can’t justify the right of the state to inflict suffering on criminals. Retributivism respects the autonomy of individuals so it can justify punishment in principle – but not in practice, at least not in a capitalist system. So it ends up offering a transcendental sanction of the status quo. We debate the merits of Murphy’s attack on Rawls and social contract theory under capitalism, along with the Marxist analysis of the roots of criminal behavior.

Plus – the headline says it all: Blame The Brain, Not Bolsonaro, For Brazil’s Riots.

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• ReThinking with Adam Grant

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Links:

• What Neuroscience Tells Us About Insurrections | Essay
• Murphy, J. G. (1973). Marxism and retribution. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 217-243.
• Psych (with Paul Bloom and David Pizarro)

David and Tamler get lost in the world of Susanna Clarke’s "Piranesi," a hauntingly beautiful and thrilling novel with echoes of Borges, Plato, C.S. Lewis, and even Parfit. The first part of our conversation is spoiler-free so you can listen to that section if you haven’t read it yet. (But seriously read this book! We both read it in a few days.)

Plus, watch out ladies - Sydney the Bing chatbot is coming to steal your man.

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Links:

• Why a Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled - The New York Times
• Kevin Roose’s Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot: Full Transcript - The New York Times
• From Bing to Sydney – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke [amazon.com affiliate link]
• Piranesi (novel) - Wikipedia
• The meditative empathy of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi - Vox — Carla Baricz’s reading of Piranesi through the Romantics, at Ploughshares
• Piranesi’s Disenchanted World
• Susanna Clarke’s Fantasy World of Interiors | The New Yorker

Tamler’s earlier self committed to doing an episode on Parfit, and David holds his current self to that promise, which shows how unconvinced David was by Parfit’s skepticism about personal identity. Or something like that. We argue about the value of Parfit’s sci-fi thought experiments and the implications of believing there’s no clear sense of “me.” Plus, we talk about a recent article on aphantasia – the inability to conjure images in your mind – and the question that pops into everyone’s head when they hear about this condition.

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Links:

• Aphantasia - Wikipedia
• Can't See Pictures in Your Mind? You're Not Alone. - The New York Times
• The Vividness Of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (the “aphantasia Test”)
• Break Music | Backslide by peez
• How To Be Good | The New Yorker (Profile on Derek Parfit by Larissa MacFarquar)
• Parfit, D. (1971) Personal Identity, The Philosophical Review, 80, 3-27.

It’s the episode that Tamler has been waiting for – a long deep dive into Andrei Tarkovsky’s mysterious masterpiece "Stalker." A writer and professor are led by their guide (Stalker) into a cordoned off “zone” that may have been visited by a meteorite (or aliens) a couple of decades earlier. Their destination – a room in the zone that according to legend grants people their deepest desire, the one that has made them suffer the most. We gush over Tarkovsky’s filmmaking, his use of sound and music, and the richness of the questions this movie raises about meaning, art, delusion, desire, science, and faith.

Plus, does having a small penis make you want to buy a sports car? Pre-crisis social psychology is back!

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Links:

• Richardson, D. C., Devlin, J., Hogan, J. S., & Thompson, C. (2023). Small Penises and Fast Cars: Evidence for a Psychological Link.
• Stalker (1979 film) - Wikipedia