Extrapolator Geoff Allen

What if we could recreate our forests, using biotech to bring back trees that are extinct? We now have that technology. We could replant a modified American chestnut tree all across the eastern United States. But should we do it?
A conversation about genetic engineering, human intervention, nature, the wild and what is meant to be.
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Evelyn Brister is a Professor of Philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY, USA. She is President of the Public Philosophy Network, a professional organisation that supports philosophers in collaborative teaching and scholarship outside their academic communities. She is the editor, with Robert Frodeman, of A Guide to Field Philosophy (Routledge, 2020), a collection of essays examining collaborations between philosophers and policymakers, and she has written over 20 journal articles in philosophy and environmental science.
Evelyn’s current research examines how values shape the use of biotechnology for conservation as well as other issues in land use and management. In 2020, she took part in a workshop with Revive & Restore to assess the possible application of genomic tools to plant and wildlife conservation.
Read Evelyn’s paper, ‘Not the Same Old Chestnut: Rewilding Forests with Biotechnology’: https://www.acf.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/2020-Brister-Newhouse-Env-Ethics.pdf
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The ultimate guide to creating a podcast: (1) branding, (2) prepping content, (3) producing audio, and (4) distributing/promoting.
If you’re a podcast enthusiast, you'll hear about the secrets from behind the scenes. And if you want to create your own podcast, this is a great place to learn about all the steps, from start to finish.
Philipp the Interpolator (a good friend of mind) agreed to wear the interviewer hat for the day. Listen as Philipp probes me about the process and learns how to create and publish a podcast.
There’s a ‘cheat sheet’ that comes with this episode. It’s a visual summary of everything you need to know about the podcasting process and it’s available for free at:
geoffallenwriting.wordpress.com/cheatsheet
 
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In this episode, Geoff and Richard discuss the Headless Way, which is a set of reflections and guided meditations that centre around seeing *who you really are*. Richard even guides the listener through a few ‘experiments’ from the Headless Way.
The Headless Way seeks to highlight what experience is like from a first-person point of view – as a subject. When you look at the world as a subject, you have no head. That’s ‘headlessness’. Of course, you still have a head, but it’s only visible from the third-person point of view – as an object, as a person.
As adults, we go through life seeing ourselves as others see us. For others, we are an object, a person (with a head), a thing. So, we learn to see ourselves as an object for others. Richard encourages us to re-learn what it is like to see ourselves from the first-person point of view – as headless subjects, as empty space for the world.
Geoff and Richard discuss the many, deep implications of the Headless Way: identity (who is at the centre of experience?); third-person science versus the science of the first person; links with psychology and mainstream science; theory of mind; stages of development; learning to wear your face; creativity; learning to live with dualisms; otherness and separateness; projection and reflection; sociology, politics and foreign policy; perception; our experience of time; the distance of observation in physics; other animals; other sense modalities; language and culture; and other topics.
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Richard Lang discovered the Headless Way in 1970 when he met Douglas Harding, author of On Having No Head. Though he was only 17, Richard recognised that the Headless Way experiments are astonishingly effective at delivering the experience of *who you really are*. Since then, Richard has been involved in sharing the experience of *who we really are* with others and now has many friends around the world. In 1996, he set up the Shollond Trust, a UK charity dedicated to sharing the Headless Way.
Richard is the author of the books Seeing Who You Really Are (2003), Open to the Source: Selected Teachings of Douglas Harding (2005), Celebrating Who We Are (2017), The Man With No Head: The Life and Ideas of Douglas Harding (2017) – and the editor of a recent volume of Douglas Harding’s work, As I See It: Articles, selected by Richard Lang (2018). He is also the narrator for audiobook versions of Harding’s books, The Science of the First Person and On Having No Head.
You can find more material on the Headless Way in several places: on Richard’s website (headless.org); on YouTube (youtube.com/RichardLangHeadexchange); through The Headless Way app (on iTunes App Store or Google Play); through Waking Up, a meditation app by Sam Harris; and on Richard’s own podcast channel (search for ‘Richard Lang – Headless Way’).
If you wish to attend a free Zoom meeting with others who are interested in the Headless Way, please contact Richard through his website (headless.org).
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In this episode, Geoff and Lauren discuss a range of causal concepts and analogies that we encounter in scientific work. Lauren is doing important work in philosophy of science, writing about casual explanations. She argues that the concept of a ‘mechanism’ (an analogy to a machine) has been over-extended, particularly by new mechanist philosophers. Lauren points to the other causal concepts used by scientists: a ‘pathway’ (an analogy to a roadway) and a ‘cascade’ (an analogy to a waterfall or the snowball effect). The evidence points towards a diversity of causal concepts and causal structures.
Geoff and Lauren discuss: analogies for causation (mechanism, pathway, cascade); distinguishing mechanism vs. pathway; distinguishing mechanism vs. cascade; making connection in different domains of life; analogies and other language for explaining; stories and visual imagery; causation and the goal of control; the observer in science; insights from cognitive science (in fields like causal cognition or cognitive metaphysics); investigating human biases; Lauren’s background from medical school to HPS; big picture questions about medicine (biology, diseases, patient outcomes); applying medical training to HPS; causation as it features in different scientific disciplines; background conditions in biology vs. physics; three types of pluralism (structures, methods and the definition of causation); and other topics!
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Lauren Ross is an Associate Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine. She has an MD from the School of Medicine at the University of California, Irvine and a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh. This crossover influences a good deal of her work in philosophy of biology, philosophy of neuroscience and philosophy of medicine.
Lauren’s research focuses on causation and explanation in science. In her recent work, she analyses how scientists provide explanations by using various causal concepts and analogies, such as ’mechanism’, ‘pathway’ and ‘cascade’.  For this work she has received the NSF Career Award and the Humboldt Experienced Researcher Fellowship.  In other projects, Lauren has discussed causal explanation in neuroscience (neural connections in the brain), in psychiatry (psychiatric genetics) and in chemistry (the periodic table).
https://www.lps.uci.edu/~rossl/
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In this episode, Geoff and Tim discuss philosophy for daily life. In particular, they talk about Stoicism: the wisdom that the Ancient Stoics can offer us, and which parts might be useful for life in the twenty-first century. They present these topics in an accessible way, discussing bitesize quotes, and reflecting on ways that philosophy can be relevant to the people and situations we encounter in daily life.
They discuss: applying philosophy to entrepreneurship and business; Stoic meditations; modern commentators on Stoicism, like William Irvine and Ryan Holiday; logos; pain and suffering; control; reason and emotion; nihilism and meaning; the historical lens versus the philosophical lens; psychology and stress management techniques; negative visualisation; prospective retrospective; the meaning of life; hedonism versus tranquility; pleasure; accepting versus resisting; philosophical tools and philosophical solutions; and other topics.
Geoff and Tim begin by reminiscing about how they met. It all came from a chance encounter in South East Asia in 2018…
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Tim Haldorsson is an entrepreneur. He works in tech and runs a marketing and web development team. Tim is an everyday philosopher, who uses ancient philosophy to guide him in making business decisions. For these practices, he draws on books like Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
Tim is also a big fan of traveling and has spent the last five years living away from his home country, Sweden, visiting many different countries. These destinations have included: Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, South Africa and – most recently – Portugal and Madeira Island. Tim likes to think of himself as a digital nomad.
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In this episode, Geoff Allen speaks with Pete Mandik about perception and reality. They touch on some of the most intriguing issues concerning representation, egocentricity and perspective. Moreover, they discuss the different ways that minds make sense of reality – such as, the conception of hydrogen versus the conception of a hipster.
Geoff and Pete start with a more general discussion of backgrounds and upbringings. They swap stories of being children with philosophical thoughts and, later, discovering philosophy as a path. They also cover: popularising philosophy; mixing philosophy with art and music; drawing on empirical work; the PR problems of academics and intellectuals; political persecution of academics (in Mexico and Hungary); totalising projects for unifying knowledge; intellectual modesty; and other topics.
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Pete Mandik is a Professor of Philosophy at William Paterson University. He is the author of the books Key Terms in Philosophy of Mind (2010) and This is Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction (2013), and a co-author of the book Cognitive Science: An Introduction to the Mind and Brain (2006). His latest book, Physicalist Theories of Consciousness, will be published by Cambridge University Press as part of the Elements in Philosophy of Mind series, edited by Keith Frankish.
Pete’s research touches on points of intersection between philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences, especially neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence. He is primarily interested in naturalistic accounts of consciousness and intentionality. His main lines of research to date have focused largely on three areas: (i) neurophilosophical explanations of phenomenal consciousness; (ii) artificial-life experiments on the evolutionary emergence of representational content; and (iii) the role of action-oriented representations as the basis for enactive cognition and perception.
http://www.petemandik.com
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