Solomon & Smith

Solomon & Smith
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Solomon & Smith discuss literature, philosophy, history, film, and the meaning of the universe.

  1. 2 days ago

    Consciousness is NOT an illusion... REALITY IS | William Seager

    Please help us continue having these discussions on Patreon, or follow us on other Podcast channels here: https://linktr.ee/solomon_smith 00:00:00 Intro 00:07:38 Why Does Consciousness Break Science 00:10:40 Is Life Special? Biophychism: Is Life Consciousness? 00:14:40 Are Observations (Quantum Physics) Dependent on Consciousness? 00:18:10 A Unique Element of Consciousness, distinguishing it from Life 00:21:25 Why is Consciousness Not A Vague Concept? 00:26:40 Are Our Brains Lying to Us? Is Consciousness an Illusion 00:32:58 Is Artificial Intelligence Conscious? 00:35:00 Epiphenomenalism 00:39:25 The Matrix and Divorce of Mind and Reality 00:42:25 How Much of Our Awareness Relies on Sense Data? 00:48:40 Pure Being and Pure Consciousness 00:52:12 Panpsychism, and how it solves the problem of consciousness 00:56:45 Mysterianism and Colin McGinn 00:59:06 Is Panpsychism just sexed-up materialism? 01:03:17 Weak vs. Strong Emergence 01:07:25 Is Panpsychism an Imaginary Science? 01:10:45 Consciousness is Integrated Information 01:14:08 Cosmopsychism 01:20:13 Physical Reactivity is the Signature of Consciousness 01:23:39 Could dark matter or antimatter be without consciousness?

  2. 5 days ago

    The Dark Religion of American Literature | Taylor Caron on the Neo-Gnostics

    Please help us continue having these discussions on Patreon, or follow us on other Podcast channels here: https://linktr.ee/solomon_smith Taylor returns to take Milo and Jack through ten great works of American "Gnostic" literature, beginning with Emerson’s Nature and ending, exactly a century later, with Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Along the way: Jones Very believes himself to be Christ, Hawthorne discovers the stain in creation, Ahab declares war on visible reality, Whitman meets the “real Me”, Dickinson confronts an inaccessible God, and Melville, Bierce, West, and Faulkner push the American suspicion of the world into ever darker territory. Part two of our Gnostic Bonanza; the first part - on the original Gnostics - available here: https://youtu.be/brOyXDlaA-Y?si=DQGCLCq61lwZm4PG CHAPTERS 00:00 Introduction 03:24 I. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Nature (1836) 11:15 II. Jones Very – Essays and Poems (1839) 18:48 III. Nathaniel Hawthorne – Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) 24:46 IV. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick (1851) 34:55 V. Walt Whitman – Sea-Drift / “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” (1860) 41:21 VI. Emily Dickinson – Poems (1861–65) 50:53 VII. Herman Melville – Clarel (1876) 59:01 VIII. Ambrose Bierce – Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) 1:04:10 IX. Nathanael West – Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) 1:07:38 X. William Faulkner – Absalom, Absalom! (1936) 1:21:04 American Gnosticism – Final Thoughts

  3. 11 Sept

    The Christians Who Thought God Was Evil | Taylor Caron on the Gnostic Gospels

    Please help us continue having these discussions by supporting us over on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/SolomonSmith Solomon & Smith on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/solomon-smith/id6808681930 On Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2DkVPzTS5lHkynSlHMyOL2?si=FsVpIakbR861Vg9jM3WZvQ&utm_source=copy-link On Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7ca1e4c1-2e5a-4691-9c32-35c05fc01f05 On iHeart: https://iheart.com/podcast/343165456 In this episode of Solomon and Smith, Jack and Milo speak with Taylor Caron about the Gnostics: those strange, alluring, heretical early Christians who believed that the physical world was corrupt, that its creator was not the highest God, and that salvation came through secret knowledge of the divine world beyond this one. This is the first part of a two-part conversation. In this episode, we begin with the original Gnostics: the lost gospels, the Nag Hammadi texts, the Gospel of Thomas, the Secret Book of John, the Gospel of Judas, Valentinus, the Gospel of Truth, Thunder, Perfect Mind, the Epistle to Flora, the Gospel of Philip, and the Second Treatise of the Great Seth. In the next part, we turn to American Gnosticism and the strange afterlife of these ideas in modern literature. What is Gnosticism? Is the material world evil? Was Yahweh the demiurge? Who or what is Barbello? Why does Jesus keep appearing as a child, an old woman, a voice, a double, a robe, a cosmic emissary, or a being laughing from outside the crucifixion? And how did a collection of bizarre early Christian texts found in Egypt in 1945 come to haunt modern religion, literature, conspiracy, pop culture, Harold Bloom, The Da Vinci Code, and the idea of hidden knowledge itself? Chapters: 00:00 Was Valentinus better than the Bible? 01:10 Introduction 05:47 Taylor enters 07:50 What is Gnosticism? 09:30 Nag Hammadi and the lost texts 11:01 The basic Gnostic worldview 15:18 I. The Gospel of Thomas 20:30 II. The Secret Book of John 23:18 Barbello, Sophia and the demiurge 29:42 III. The Hymn of the Pearl 34:15 IV. The Gospel of Judas 38:38 Crucifixion, flesh and anti-natalism 40:09 V. Valentinus' Fragments 45:24 VI. The Gospel of Truth 52:16 VII. Thunder Perfect Mind 56:20 VIII. The Epistle to Flora 1:01:18 Jesus and the Hebrew Bible 1:05:27 IX. The Gospel of Philip 1:10:46 X. The Second Treatise of the Great Seth 1:15:48 Orthodoxy, heresy and the stakes of the crucifixion

  4. 8 Sept

    Youtube Just Made Views Worthless | Hyper Viewflation

    Please help us continue having these discussions by supporting us over on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/SolomonSmith What is a view? What is attention? Does a number become more real if it is larger? Are advertisers being ushered into a hall of mirrors? And if every video, every creator, every athlete, every billionaire, and every man on earth can be given a bigger number, have we made the world better — or simply made value meaningless? We discuss YouTube views, attention inflation, dead internet paradise, advertisers, Zimbabwean trillionaires, egalitarianism, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, cinema box office inflation, World of Warcraft stat squish, the psychological horror of decline, the impossibility of measuring attention, the parable of the workers in the vineyard, angelic value, Christianity, equality, and whether every mote of dust has infinite worth. Chapters: 00:00 The number goes up 00:51 Introduction 04:45 YouTube changes the view count 08:02 Advertisers and the fantasy economy 12:40 Do labels change reality? 14:47 Egalitarianism, power and resentment 19:03 Do big numbers hide inequality? 22:35 Cinema, inflation and fake success 24:22 Stat squish and the horror of smaller numbers 27:14 What can value actually measure? 31:07 Can attention ever be quantified? 36:01 The workers in the vineyard 38:01 Earthly numbers and angelic value 42:36 YouTube views in heaven 43:38 Christianity, equality and infinite worth

  5. 4 Sept

    Why We May Never Understand Consciousness | Colin McGinn on Mind and Language

    Please help us continue having these discussions by supporting us over on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/SolomonSmith Thinkers mentioned: Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, Charles Darwin, Paul Grice, Fred Dretske, Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Saul Kripke, Richard Montague, Iain McGilchrist, Alfred Tarski 00:00:00 Introduction 00:04:49 Knife Throwing, Other Athletic Activities 00:11:57 Poetic Epigraph 00:13:05 How to integrate Philosophy, Linguistics, and Biology? Should philosophers read Dawkins? Should biologists read Tarski? 00:20:15 Origins of language. Are any aspects of language as old as consciousness? 00:27:39 Can we only discuss language in language? 00:29:06 Are all philosophical problems linguistic? Analytic philosophy 00:32:45 Fodor and the Language of thought. Language without communication 00:34:50 Consciousness and the limits of knowing 00:39:38 Can something exist without you knowing it? 00:42:40 Can we understand/build a mind? 00:43:49 Links between Mysterianism and Apathatic theology? 00:48:13 Does McGinn's Mysterianism conflict with his Naturalism? 00:50:10 Why do we have introspection? 00:55:28 Do our brains see the world dualistically to support the existence of language? 01:01:35 Wittgenstein's Investigations. Split brains. McGilchrist. 01:03:43 The brain has over-invested in spatial reasoning. 01:06:16 Communication without symbols, without linguistic utterance. 01:11:38 Philosophers don't pay enough attention to animals. Darwin, etc. 01:14:35 Philosophers read too much psychology, and don't understand it.

  6. 28 Aug

    Is AI About to Kill Mathematics? | Kirwin Hampshire

    Please help us continue having these discussions by supporting us over on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/SolomonSmith Kirwin's article on mathematics is available here: https://kirwinhampshire.substack.com/p/the-dark-night-of-mathematics In this episode of Solomon and Smith, Jack and Milo speak with Kirwin Hampshire, mathematics PhD and author of the Substack Ossuray Lost at Sea. Is mathematics discovered or invented? Is it a formal game, a spiritual art form, a machine for generating truth, or the highest expression of human creativity? And what happens when AI begins solving open problems, producing counterexamples, and doing the thing mathematicians thought belonged to the strange, private, intuitive life of the mind? We discuss what a number is, why mathematics feels certain in a way other forms of knowledge often do not, whether infinity and zero expand the limits of thought, and why mathematical discovery can feel closer to art, wizardry, or religious revelation than to ordinary technical work. Then we turn to the nightmare: AI-generated mathematics, the psychology of being scooped by a machine, and the possibility that human mathematicians may be reduced to checking, verifying, and understanding what machines have already produced. Is AI killing maths? Or is it revealing what mathematics really was all along? Topics include: AI and mathematics, mathematical creativity, open problems, counterexamples, proof, intuition, infinity, zero, Gödel, Cantor, mathematical beauty, the philosophy of maths, AI art, chess engines, human purpose, dangerous knowledge, truth versus goodness, and whether machines are about to ruin the most beautiful thing humans ever made. Chapters: 00:00 AI and the human gap 01:15 Introduction 05:58 The challenge 07:37 Kirwin enters 10:00 Poetic epigraph 11:37 What is a number? 17:11 Maths, mind, and reality 20:37 Mathematics as creativity 22:30 Infinity and the machinery of thought 26:45 Falling in love with maths 32:15 Discovery, invention and the unfinished painting 37:14 Has maths become too arcane? 41:35 AI enters mathematics 44:11 AI counterexamples and open problems 49:39 Chess, machines and the loss of spark 52:36 Humans as the AI’s assistant 57:22 Intuition and the human gap 1:02:34 Dangerous truth and the Copernican trauma 1:06:50 The Impossible Luddite 1:13:40 Why does AI hurt? 1:16:12 Is AI just another tool? 1:21:17 Truth, beauty and incompatible desires 1:24:08 Process versus result Performance of the second movement from Bartók's second quartet by the Carmel Quartet, used under the following license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

  7. 25 Aug

    Classic Literature Is WAY More Fun Than You Think (1710-1840) | Emma Schilders

    *Emma's list is pasted below* Please help us to continue having these conversations on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/solomonsmith/membership Emma's channel can be found at: https://youtube.com/@sarcastic_fish?si=J3bGM11vCKSxpt3p 1710s - Robinson Crusoe: Daniel Defoe 1720s - Roxana: Daniel Defoe 1730s - Manon Lescaut: Abbé Prévost 1740s - Pamela: Samuel Richardson 1750s - The Female Quixote: Charlotte Lennox 1760s - Barren Decade - TBR: Castle of Otranto, A Sentimental Journey 1770s - The Sorrows of Young Werther: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1780s - Dangerous Liasons: Pierre Choderlos de Laclos 1790s - Justine: Marquis de Sade 1800s - Corinne, or Italy: Madame de Staël 1810s - Frankenstein: Mary Shelley 1820s - Barren Decade - TBR: The Betrothed 1830s - The Charterhouse of Parma: Stendhal 1840s - The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas 00:00:00 Intro 00:04:35 What's so interesting about the 1700s? 00:06:53 1710s 00:11:30 1720s 00:14:54 1730s 00:20:19 1740s 00:24:04 1750s 00:29:38 1760s 00:33:00 1770s 00:36:00 1780s 00:43:40 1790s 00:49:26 1800s 00:54:51 1810s 01:05:34 1820s 01:09:03 1830s 01:13:05 1840s

  8. 21 Aug

    Why Understanding Reality Isn’t Enough | Igor Kufayev

    Please help us to continue having these conversations on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/solomonsmith/membership You can buy Igor's books directly from his publishing house here: https://songpublishing.org/?v=b6bb43df4525 In this wide-ranging conversation, artist and spiritual teacher Igor Kufayev talks with Jack and Milo about consciousness, meditation, Kashmir Shaivism (Trika Shaivism), aesthetics, creativity and the relationship between spiritual experience and everyday perception. He reflects on a profound early meditation experience that transformed his relationship with his body and consciousness, and the moment he put Heidegger aside in favour of seeking direct experience rather than intellectual understanding. The conversation moves from Western philosophy to the Bhagavad Gita, Kashmir Shaivism, Abhinavagupta and the concept of camatkāra—the rapture or astonishment of aesthetic experience. We also explore how ordinary reality became dull, whether consciousness actually creates the world we experience, and why the promise of extraordinary spiritual experiences distracts us from the extraordinary nature of everyday life. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:05:33 Uzbek Fruits/Raisins - Poetic epigraph 00:09:07 The meaning crisis began with the search for meaning 00:12:19 Bronze Age Greece, The Odyssey, Greek sculpture 00:16:10 Modernity and Meaning - Life Under Socialism 00:23:57 The Anatomy of Experience - Fire and Karl Marx 00:32:10 Loving the West in Central Asia 00:37:37 Disillusionment with Michelangelo, waiting for the Muse 00:41:04 Adi Shankaracharya vs. Abhinavagupta 00:47:52 Existentialism. Kung-fu Art Philosopher Musician Sage, murdered by the Mafia 00:52:05 Tragedy, Faith, Sri Aurobindo 00:56:39 Initiation into Meditation in a Dream 01:01:56 Can you have a moment of absolute transcendence which you don't notice? 01:07:10 Idealism. We animate reality by perceiving it. 01:11:35 Outright rejection of Heidegger and Western Philosophy 01:17:50 Outright love of Western Art 01:19:47 Reading Indian Spiritual Classics 01:23:55 Swami Muktananda and discovering Trika Shaivism 01:26:54 Camatkara, the bridge between art and spirit 01:34:32 Final Question

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Solomon & Smith discuss literature, philosophy, history, film, and the meaning of the universe.

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  • Creator
    Solomon & Smith
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    49
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 All rights reserved.
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    Solomon & Smith