Podcasts | Meaningness

My own podcast

Podcasting is a way to explain concepts in a format different from web text. Some ideas seem better expressed in speech than text, or require less effort to explain equally well.

All these podcast episodes include full transcripts. Different people find it easier to absorb material in different media, and providing both audio and text makes them accessible to different audiences.

Appearances on other podcasts

Several podcast hosts have invited me to speak with them. This has been a great opportunity for exchange of ideas in discussion.

I’ve listed all my podcast appearances below, most recent first. For each, I link the podcast’s web page for the episode, and often also a page in which I discuss it.

Pengi: the offloaded brain

I discussed Pengi, a program I wrote with Phil Agre in our PhD work, with Brian Marick.

Pengi was the first AI system in what’s now called the “enactive” approach in cognitive science. Its official academic write-up is here. I wrote about its role in my overall arc of thought in 2011 in “I seem to be a fiction” (and in several other places).

Brian is a pioneer of the Agile approach to software development, and one of the signatories on the original Agile Manifesto. His very interesting podcast series “Oddly Influenced” is about bringing ideas from outside software engineering to software engineering. His expertise is particularly in the area of program testing.

That reminded me, as a near-total non-sequitur, that I wrote what was, as far as I know, the first-ever automated software testing system (1982).

Podcast link | December, 2023

Pretending to believe

A two-part discussion in May, 2022, with Matt Arnold, who produces the Meaningness audiobook.

Part 1 concerns the nebulosity of believing. It is often not clear what it would even mean to believe something; not clear whether one does; and not clear even what the thing is that one is doing the believing about. It may be helpful to understand “believing” as a diverse class of interactive activities—not as a simple, objective fact about your brain state. (I wrote about this in “Reasonable believings.”)

Part 2 concerns ideological believing, which seems to work quite differently from believing (or knowing) ordinary facts. (I wrote about this in “Vaster than ideology.”) We discuss several specific examples.