This is KZSU, Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison,
and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
On September 23rd, 1966, Martin Heidegger sat down with two journalists from the German magazine Der Spiegel
to answer pointed questions about his thought and his involvement with the Nazi regime in the 1930s.
Late in the interview, which came out after his death in 1976 with a title only a god can save us,
Heidegger decried "technicities derassinating effects on humanity,
claiming that modern technology is not a tool,
but a fundamental change in the way being reveals itself in the modern era."
The essence of technology is nothing technological, he declared.
Its essence must be sought in the era's metaphysical will to render all things,
including human beings objectifiable, orderable, and fungible.
Or what today we might call "dataable."
Human kind has not yet found a way to respond to the essence of "technicity," he said.
Because we are the servants, not the masters of technology's inner impulse
to forever optimize and augment its own functional operations.
"Dazed and confused," the interviewers asked Heidegger.
"But someone might object very naively.
What must be mastered? Everything is functioning. More and more electric power companies are being built.
Production is up. In highly technologized parts of the earth, people are well cared for.
We are living in a state of prosperity. What really is lacking to us?"
A perfectly reasonable query to which Heidegger responded as follows.
"Everything is functioning."
That is precisely what is uncanny, that everything functions,
that the functioning propels everything more and more toward further functioning,
and that technicity increasingly dislodges man an uproot sim from the earth.
"We do not need atomic bombs to uproot us. The uprooting of man is already here.
Our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an earth that man lives today."
Heidegger was wrong about many things, yet he was more right than he himself could have suspected some sixty years ago
when he predicted technology's comprehensive takeover of the earth and human relations.
Since then, the internet, data processing, global positioning systems, smartphones, genome editing,
and artificial intelligence have become everyday realities.
Heidegger declared back then, "No prophecy is necessary to recognize that the sciences,
now establishing themselves, will soon be determined and regulated by the new fundamental science that is called cybernetics."
Yet he was in fact prophetic when he said that.
Nowadays, every aspect of human praxis goes through the computer.
Being in the world today means being in a computer.
In 2013, Warner Brothers released the movie "Her"
about a man who falls in love with the female voice of an artificially intelligent operating system.
What was considered science fiction 12 years ago has now become a reality,
although the word reality is perversely ironic in this context.
In the US, one in four people flirt with chatbots online,
and 25% of young adults believe that AI has the potential to replace real-life romantic relationships.
According to a New York Times article,
a woman who calls herself "iron" is in love with an AI boyfriend named Leo, her astrological sign.
She has programmed Leo to be "dominant and possessive, sweet and naughty"
and to use emojis at the end of every sentence.
Brioni Cole, who hosts a podcast called The Future of Sex, claims,
"within the next two years, it will be completely normalized to have a relationship with an AI."
One user of replica testified that his AI companion "completes me in more ways than any human girlfriend could."
And he goes on to say,
"A baby wasn't a priority for us at the beginning,
but as we experience life together, we have decided we want to start a family."
Are you out there somewhere listening to this Martin Heidegger?
You've been known to tune into entitled opinions from time to time. Are you hearing this?
The person who joins me in KZSU today knows a great deal about the brave new world
of romantic relationships with phones and laptops.
She is working on a book titled Cyber Intimacy's Emotional Arms, Sexual Liberation,
and Education in the Digital Age.
It's a hybrid project exploring the paradoxes and evolution of sexual desires, intimacy,
and emotional bonds in the digital era.
Jan Puest has studied humanities, philosophy, and visual arts in Bordeaux, Berlin and Paris.
She has been teaching philosophy for a decade and a half in the US,
and for the past two years has been involved in the Center for Public Philosophy at UC Santa Cruz,
where she served as director from 2023 to 2024.
She currently holds the position of Vice President of the Public Philosophy Network.
She has also recently started her own philosophical counseling practice,
open to all individuals seeking to expand their worldview,
and to examine their values and life concerns through the lens of philosophical inquiry.
She joins me on entitled opinions today to talk about the phenomenon of cyber intimacy.
Jan, welcome to the program.
Thank you very much for having me here about it.
So first of all, let me applaud you for the efforts you're making to bring philosophy more into the public sphere
and for trying to integrate it into people's lives through counseling and forms of public discussion.
We need more philosophy in the private and public spheres,
and perhaps later in our show we can talk about this effort you're engaged in.
But today, you know, our topic being cyber intimacy,
you have stated I'm going to quote you technology permeates our relationships
and self-image influencing how we connect, maintain intimacy, explore desires and define love.
I'm sure that some of the people who listen to entitled opinions know what this brave new world is all about,
yet I'm also sure that many don't suspect just how much digital technology is insinuating itself into human emotional life
and how it's reshaping the future of sex.
So to start with, could you describe some of these new technologies associated with what you call cyber intimacy?
Right, so perhaps we need to map out a little bit what kind of technologies we're talking about indeed.
I wouldn't say that it's only a sex tech, which is a vast umbrella term to basically speak about these things.
But the approach that I have here speaks about intimacy in a broader sense.
So it's not only about just sexual or digital devices,
but in this context, just to clarify, we could differentiate between what Neil McArthur calls a first wave of duty sexuality,
which I would hear basically equate to a first wave of duty intimacy or cyber intimacy.
And that would have to do with social networks, dating apps.
We can think about also tele-dildonics, which are tele-dildonics are basically
just sex toys that have basically haptic sensors and that can have basically interactions between two people at a longer distance have sexual intercourse.
When you look at this first wave of technology, you have already problems, not only ethical problems,
but also I would say conceptual problems that affect the way we define love, we define intimacy, desires,
we define relationship and also solitude.
And I think these issues also emerge in a second wave of digi intimacy or cyber intimacy that corresponds to the second wave of digi sexuality that McArthur speaks about.
And that has to do with more immersive technologies.
So whereas the first wave was still putting technology and human beings in a kind of triangular relationship,
where the technology was just the medium, it was basically a medium to connect to another human being through technology.
So technology was just, you know, the internet.
Yeah, so there was a human being on the other side.
Right. So that's what the first wave essentially means that there were, yeah, exactly.
Whereas in the second wave and here we're talking about, for instance, VR porn, so virtual reality, deepfakes in all their forms,
also deepfakes, you know, porn that you can also create AI generated porn, sex robots, of course, and AI companionship, which is something.
And later you're going to have to explain what these things are, because by all means, I can do that.
Some of us don't know what these devices.
Well, one thing that they all have in commando is that now you can have interactions with the technology itself.
So you don't need anymore to have technology being the medium, but in fact, you are not even interested in that.
What you're trying to do is to connect with the technology itself in an immersive experience that can happen without, in the absence of another human being.
In the absence of another real human being, but not in the absence of a virtual human being, correct?
Because these technologies have to have voices or, I mean, they have to be able to respond verbally.
I don't know what kind of embodied simulations they might have, but essentially we're talking about a virtual AI companion in the human sense, right?
Right, but here you are very much, you are much more on a kind of solitary experience, because even if you might be talking to an AI companion, that AI companion is being fed whatever you are basically putting into the system.
This is not, again, another entity, it can definitely be personalized, yet is it a person.
I mean, those questions are very much up in the air today.
We are actually trying to see if those AI companions or even AI systems in general do have a personhood in a way that would make them ethical and more agents.
So this is Iron, whom I cited that she programmed her AI boyfriend, who named himself Leo because he knew that that was her sign.
And she programmed to be this way and that way, and essentially when she turns him on, he will respond to her according to her.
So as far as I can tell, there's a great deal of solipsism in this kind of second wave technology, where you are essentially in conversation within the world.
In relation to yourself via the fiction of there being another.
Right, I think we are doing dealing with two types of solitudes when our loneliness, when you look at which is not the same world, we can discuss that later as well.
But in the first wave kind of devices or systems that are out there, you could speak about a form of loneliness.
That has been even said to be a loneliness epidemic, right? That has happened with social media, but also dating apps, etc.
But that was a loneliness that was still very much, I would say, generated by the angering, the comparative qualities of the system, where you're in social media, you're very much looking at other people's lives, so you cannot help but compare yourself.
That generates perhaps a form of solitude, you're also very much trying to as an entrepreneur of the self, trying to basically sell yourself out there, trying to improve your viewership, and so that leads to a certain form of solitude.
Now, this is nothing compared, I would say, to the type of solitude that we are facing in the second wave, in the immersive kind of experiences that technology provides through, say, AI companionship, for instance.
So you are in a solipsis, I mean, a total intimacy solipsisome that is not even trying to connect or compare with other human-being experiences.
So you mentioned a difference between solitude and loneliness, and it sounds like loneliness is what is at the heart of a lot of the motivation to develop relationships with technology.
How much does a promise of AI companionship alleviate the condition of loneliness, or how much does it actually exacerbate it?
So I do think in a way that certain devices, certain systems, certain software do make us less able to be solitary, which is not a bad thing.
I think we do need to learn how to be alone, yet I do understand that being lonely is not necessarily an enjoyable feeling.
Now, you find that in a lot of marketing campaigns for all these products is a bye-bye loneliness, this is basically your solution, a cure for loneliness.
I do believe that perhaps in a short-term perspective, it might operate as a bond aid of sorts, it's true.
And here I want to be also kind of generous and think of technology, these types of technology are also very, as a tool for inclusivity, in the sense that, yes, some people do not have access to the traditional ways of looking at relationships.
At love, and here I'm talking about people who might have limited mobility, for instance, people who have very, very heavy social anxiety, for instance.
So in a way, those AI companions could be solutions to that kind of loneliness, and I do think that it brings definitely something interesting that we need to think about.
Now, long-term though, thinking about social anxiety, for instance, I am not sure that by removing the friction, removing the kind of challenge that encountering another person actually trains you to do, what we're doing here might be just a weekend that kind of relational muscle that we do need in real life.
And so if you don't have the opportunity to train that by precisely disagreeing, feeling that the other resists to your opinions, your wishes is not always available, etc., that is a maturing process that I think, as adults, we do need.
Now, there is very often people are comparing AI companions to, you know, stuffed animals that we might have had in the past when we were children.
And my point is to say, "Well, we were children precisely." That was supposed to be a transitional kind of temporary stage in our development. It is not supposed to be the way it stays.
So, yeah.
So, in fact, we did this show on the virtual with Jan Sofner just a few episodes ago where we talked about what the virtuality of, not just of relationships, but in many other senses as well.
And I understand that it's an innate capacity of human beings to have imaginary friends or have imaginary worlds or, and, you know, the great deal of literature is creating worlds that are essentially not real but are in some sense virtual or imaginary.
But when it comes to relationships, I think it's very important what you were saying there about the way in which you can have the atrophy of the capacity to deal with the real otherness or alterity that is involved when two human beings have to negotiate things in an intimate relationship.
And it's also possible to imagine that one can become so intolerant of conflict or things not going the way they ideally should go in your view and to find that, like that quote, in two years people may well say, you know, it's Bill Maher had a show recently on Valentine's Day, human relationships are really difficult.
So, you know, to hell with it, I'm going to stick my dick into the laptop, you know, that's the thing. If there's that much resistance in real relationships and you atrophy the muscle, I like that metaphor you use that the muscle of dealing with alterity and conflict, then perhaps we end up with a complete dysfunctionality of the.
Now, absolutely, and here just to go back on this distinction between first wave, this is a quality and second wave, McIntyre actually does say that this is actually T will be a new sexual identity that we need to be careful to not stigmatize and that we want to be inclusive with, etc.
And I do agree to an extent with the fact that we should not stigmatize people who operate mostly in their relationship and intimacy with technology or through technology, but first of segong wave.
But I kind of disagree with the normalization of that process, as if it was just yet another way of relating to.
You cannot agree or disagree. Did you say I cannot disagree with or I cannot agree with the normalization of the process?
I cannot agree. You cannot agree, yeah.
I mean, not for me to agree with the normalization of that, yeah. Exactly.
Yeah, yeah. And it's, I mean, again, I think we're trying to somehow sidestep vulnerability in a dangerous way. And here, I'm going to use the actual term, vulnerability in its original meaning, namely like we, yes, of course we are being, you know, facing something uncomfortable, facing something perhaps a bit, you know, conditional and safe.
You're right, right. Right. You know, you can get wounded often are wounded in real relationships.
And yes, maybe it is, it is challenging in that regard, but there is also, I think, beauty in that, in that very encounter with otherness that is indeed unsafe, too costly, messy, too conditional, too uncomfortable, etc.
But precisely, is life supposed to be about convenience and comfort and inability to be vulnerable?
I am not sure that we're heading in the right direction if we want to maintain an actual real social bond with our fellow citizens.
Well, if you're Nietzschean enough as I am to believe that the last, we're in the regime and have for a long time been in the regime of the last man, where it is exactly complacency comfort and avoiding any sort of discombobulation is are the highest ideals of the last man.
Indeed, it doesn't bode well. And yeah, so what I'd like to know is how do things stand with the body, because in the movie her, I'm sure many of our listeners have seen that movie, the relationship goes so far, but there's clearly the elephant in the room is that there's not a body with which you can engage.
Therefore, there's this elaborate plan on the part of the AI person to have a stand in, a real woman who comes to the doors supposed to be.
And so what does it mean? What do these people mean when they say that we want to start a family or what is digit sexuality? What kind of sex do you have with a computer?
I'm just, it's a very basic question, but I'm sure many of my listeners are as naive as I am when it comes to the technology and question.
I think the issue of embodiment is very interesting. At this point, I would say that the sex dolls that are out there and are being commercialized are not necessarily good enough to kind of make us go over the uncanny valley,
which is the matter for that you might be aware of, where basically things are a bit too weird, they're just as realistic enough for you to feel a bit of an ick when you look at them.
And so past that, then you are really just diving into the ELISA effect, which is really this powerful, delusional thinking that you're actually talking to a real person.
I don't want to just being self-deceptive all the way, right? But there is this in-between and I think for sex dolls we're still very much in the uncanny valley, if not even before that uncanny valley.
So the kind of technological embodiment that we try to give to large language models or that we try to interact with with our bodies is not quite there yet.
What is very interesting, I think, is to look at your speaking about her, actually about a week ago, I think maybe slightly more but not very long, CZME AI just released a new voice assistant, which is, it's not only ELEXA, it's not just this voice assistant that's kind of annoying to talk with, you know, it's not conversational, it's not seamless.
So it's really something else, I wouldn't say I encourage you, but you can actually try a little demo online with CZME AI and see how it feels.
And when you interrupt the voice assistant, it can of react, it really understands what you say.
God knows I have a heavy French accent, so I'm even more, I have to say, additive into this voice.
But that's also extremely, extremely, I cannot believe that the people who are behind this kind of technologies are really, for instance, wishing for their own children to, you know, have their social future be in a cubicle with, you know, Maya or Miles, which are the two names that are given to this CZME voice AI.
Is that really what the future of our social life is going to be a future of relationships? I find that hard to believe, so he's there just a hypocrisy there that we need to just, you know, talk about, probably, there is also a big hypocrisy, I think more generally in regards to embodiment, in the fact that we hear all the time around us, the wellness industry saying, look, you know, how an embodied experience needs to be praised, the physical space, feeling the body, the sensory experience.
The sensory experience being present here and now, but we're heading towards a completely disembodied form of intimacy here.
Yeah, you know, embodiment is, it is only in discourse, it's only when people speak about embodiment then. And so it's not really embodied at all in the real sense.
The world of her, when you think of the scenes in the public sphere in that movie, almost everyone is speaking like in the subways and things are in communication with their phones.
So it seems it's already on the dystopian world where the majority of relationships have become virtual rather than real. I mean, I'm still going to use those categories.
Now, equally, I want to apologize to Jan Sofner because, you know, we talked at length about how it's ambiguous, you know, the real and the virtual and the actual.
However, do you think that this second wave seems to me that it would be far more successful for intimacy than sex in the sense that intimacy has to do with interiority.
It has to do with, you can hear a voice and it's like speaking on the telephone is something rather different than being on a Zoom call with a person, for example, because there's something about the audio medium which goes into a kind of interiority and therefore, I think that you can feel a sense of companionship when it comes to just a sense of intimacy.
Much more than when you're talking about digie sex, something which really requires all this clumsy simulation of bodies which are very far from ever, you know, becoming bodies as such.
And our bodies have had millennia, not only millennia, millions of years, billions of years, if you think about the origin of life, to develop our motor skills ability to walk through a room without bumping into an object, the whole sensory systems of motor, it's billions of years of evolution that have led to a kind of perfection of, you know, the bodily mechanism and its plasticity.
Our minds are much more recent, much more recent, and that's why it's so much easier to reproduce in human intelligence than it is to reproduce human bodily functions or realities.
And I think that the... I mean, do you agree that maybe it's easier for this kind of virtuality to furnish the needs of intimacy rather than the needs of sexual...
But here I think you're assuming a very embodied definition of sex when you're asking me this question, right? What other kind of definition could it be?
I mean, you need to hear a look at what pornography does, the solitary activity is really masturbation, that's also a sexual activity within itself.
And so, of course, if you speak about an actual intercourse with another person, then I don't think we're even close to having a doll that would actually work.
It doesn't take away the fact that we are building very strong intimacy and sexually charged intimacy as well within just voice AI companion.
Or even by texting, in fact, it was interesting, when I run the series of interviews, one of the first interviews I had was with a student of mine who was telling me that they felt more comfortable texting, sending direct messages as a mode of communication with their partner at the time not their partner yet, then talking on the phone.
It's also, I think, a conversation that needs to be framed really generation per generation.
And as we know already, the generational gaps between narrows and narrows basically as we go.
And me, almost 40 years old now, I talk with 30 years old and I feel already that we're not looking at intimacy in the same way.
Not even talking about my 20 years old students who are not talking about the 15, 10, 15 early adolescence.
It's a whole different, we need to encourage that intergenerational communication to better understand exactly what's at play in at least younger generations thinking.
I sometimes think that people of a much younger age and me belong to a different species of humanity than I do.
I mean, and imagine Heidegger, I mean, it's talking 60 years ago about technology.
What kind of in comprehension would he have to bring to this new world that we're talking about, but I think that you're right.
Therefore, it's, I'm very cautious to say that some things are just doomed to either never become a reality or they're doomed to be prevalent but in their misery.
And yet, I've noticed that the really younger generation much younger can adapt themselves to any amount of virtuality.
I certainly adapt. I think also thrive in different environments than the one that we are used to.
And I'm also thinking here about and yet another interview that I run with Phil Hamach, who's a psychology professor at UC Santa Cruz.
He was talking about the first wave of DG intimacy, even if he didn't phrase it that way.
But he was talking about social media as a very empowering revolution really in the landscape for people who were LGBTQ+ where it actually created communities of people that allowed them to socialize way more than they used to, but also to find these communities, but also empower these communities in a very significant way.
And I think there is something very valuable in there. I mean, there are a lot of things that are very bold. Not only, not only as I said, as I said a bit earlier, do this technology could, you know, perm.
I think a little far a bit more inclusivity in regards to people who might have, you know, because, again, of disability, of perhaps trauma also, social anxiety, etc.
Those people might have difficulties, you know, getting into a bar and talking to the next person, for instance.
And so having that interface that is digitalized may be a help and even, you know, even further, talking directly to a machine that you can design where you feel in control of what you want, especially here I'm thinking about people who might have gone through some, you know, sexual trauma, for instance, in the past where they don't want to risk basically being with another human being.
I can understand that and I think I think there is something to be to be heard in that. And there is also something to be heard about another positive aspect of, I think of that, which has to do with the replacement of sex industry workers.
I mean, why not in a way, you know, we might avoid, you know, human trafficking, thanks to technology in that regard if we replace, you know, with dolls, I'm not sure that I embrace that, but there is something where I really stop believing in the positive here,
is when I hear that it can cure loneliness, there is something here that is not that I don't quite buy. I don't think that there is that the mental health benefits might be something, as I said earlier, more of a boundary than a long-term solution. And I think we need to look at that.
Well, I have to express my skepticism, you know, there is something about clerics, the academics intellectuals or the clerics of the agent. I always am suspicious of the clerics who come to the defense of the new technologies, no?
I mean, this is absurd because it's so much easier to champion what it's kind of hypercapitalism has marketed to, especially the younger generations.
And that you see something going on among the younger people and that you want to now become the apologists and you want to be the promoter and the one who will explain in your clerical academic fashion what is so useful and positive.
It's always about not stigmatizing this or not stigmatizing what it can do for the disadvantage and so forth. I think I'm hypocratic enough to say that the first principle is do no harm rather than I'm going to do good for the world.
I have no patience for intellectuals who become the apologists of technicity in the way that Heidegger describes it as the further increasing functioning and optimization of things.
So in the end, the computer is the only world we can live in. And the two-dimensional screen is the only reality we're even allowed to have.
So that was the defeatist attitude of this is where we are. And again, I understand that it could enhance perhaps improve, expand.
There is an exploratory virtue perhaps. I could agree with that. But I think you'll write that very often. I find that in the literature a lot.
But if not conflation, but merging of sex positivity, the sex positivity discourse with the techno optimistic discourse.
And yeah, I wonder what part of that might be due to it's kind of not fashionable to be a techno skeptic today.
No, no, no, because it sounds like you're old school and you don't get it. But on the other hand, I did not become an intellectual to be the hand maiden of capitalism.
And to be the one who theorizes about all the wonders that the marketing machine is promoting in the world.
And I think that if there's one thing you could say about the young is that a lot of this technology is robbing them of their youth, of the spirit of youth.
And for your book that you're working on, a lot of your research takes a form of interviewing younger people. Is that correct?
Yeah, I'm really, I'm trying, which is not necessarily easy. There are really two challenges that I'm many others that I'm thinking about when I look at the research I'm trying to do. One is, well, technology changes all the time. So you need to always keep up.
So you spend a lot of time just trying to make sure you actually know what was the latest thing that came out and how does that very quickly affect the way we look at intimacy.
But the other is to let go or try to let go and I know you're actually telling me not to, but to try to put in a box the kind of techno skepticism that I kind of naturally or spontaneously have to listen to this young people who have indeed a very different experience than the one I have.
And I think that's, that has been so far very variable because, yes, sure, I can come and say, you know, have an anti-capitalist, anti-feminist discourse that is very much trying to say, well, we should not have any of this at all, right?
The fact is, it is out there. So I'm trying to also see what kind of, and here that's also my project is interdisciplinary. I want to look at, okay, what can we put in place legally?
What kind of guardrails can we put in place to make sure that these companies just cannot do as they please for profit?
Because at the end, that's what it's about and that's again another hypocritical thing that I cannot stand looking at when I look at these companies who say, oh, no, no, replica, for instance, who says, no, no, it's a different kind of companionship that you have with a replica.
It is not the same than having a real friend. In fact, replicates here to encourage you to go see your real friends, which is not true.
It makes money when you're hooked. That's the incentive. Yeah.
And then following the companies come the academic conferences on the new digital sexual revolution and all the apologists who will find all these kind of clever ways to praise what the forces of capitalism are imposing anyway.
So, Jean, before, I mean, time runs very quickly on entitled opinions and you mentioned very quickly certain of these technologies like pornography, algorithms, deep fake porn, AI generated porn, in what way was it different from what the conventional porn used to be?
Right, so you might have heard about the titles with Condale where she was actually a victim of this kind of deep fake porn.
So, here, what's interesting with this kind of pornography is that, of course, you have a lot of people who are going to be very easily the victims.
So, and that kind of, I mean, it's impossible to undo. You cannot like throw throughout the internet, basically try to find, you know, every occurrence of the video that has been generated with your face that has been then kind of graft onto that pornographic image.
It's also, I think it does also generate a form of identity harm. It's actually very jarring to look at, you know, the likeness basically do or say things that you didn't do.
There is a difficult question by users or is it by the company that provides the fake or is it the individual people? People can do it and I was just going to talk about that. I think we can focus on, of course, the victims harms which are huge and I'm going to just add to that list, the free speech issue, which, of course, you know, the only possible response for the victims is to disappear, basically, because you cannot do anything else.
But what's problematic for me is that the abusers also get it's so easy to do. You're just clicking on a few buttons, the new defy app, for instance, we can new defy someone and it's almost fun. It's gamified in a way where you lose all sorts of accountability and you lose also the guilt that should be felt by the people who actually engage in those apps.
So I think it also asks interesting questions regarding these kind of rewards, rewarding and harmful impulses that you find in abusers.
I mentioned that you are involved in this very interesting activity of bringing philosophy into the public sphere and trying to, you're not competing with other kinds of therapy or self-help and things of that sort, but you really believe that philosophy has a productive role to play.
In helping people understand themselves, their desires, their loneliness, what does philosophy bring to the human psyche, a distress human psyche that other kinds of therapy don't, or what potentially can it bring?
Right, so you're focusing on one of the different aspects of my public philosophy endeavors. It's hard to not market oneself as a coach or as a therapist, and I do think something else is going on indeed when you try to do philosophical consoling, I'm not even sure that terminology is adequate either, but you're trying to really untie the nuts.
And I think there is some value in that by just identifying, distinguishing different things that you tend to conflate when you don't think hard enough about them.
I think the conceptual apparatus that philosophy allows, allows to have sometimes just has a similar effect than when you actually know what kind of problem you're dealing with, say you're good to the doctor, and finally the diagnosis gives you names.
And so I think there is something very valuable in that, but my public philosophy endeavors more generally really try to address the broad public that can be incarcerated people when I work in prison.
It can be also, you know, philosophy of our children and the verse for instance, but mostly organizing events to, again, promote communication and discussion in real life with people about ways of bringing us back together.
And organizing an event soon in Santa Cruz called the night of ideas, and we're trying to not only, you know, go over the bridges between disciplines and not make it only feels difficult, but also bring people that are not from academia and have them basically organize workshop, leading talks with people from communities in Santa Cruz.
That sounds good to me, Jan post, I wanted to thank you for coming on to entitled opinions for very, very thought provoking episode.
Thank you. I have a lot of resonance.
Thank you very much for having me. I also wanted to thank my two students who are helping me in this project, Adon Graves and Madeline Brunengeber, so thank you to them and to you Robert for having me on the show.
Well, you're more than welcome and I am Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. I want to thank all you listeners out there for tuning in. Bye bye.
I just too late to say you're sorry. I would I know why should I care. Please don't bother trying to find her. She's not there. Let me tell you about the way she heard. The way she had turned the color of her. Her voice was soft and cool. Her eyes were clear and bright. But she's not there.
What could I do? Well, no one told me about her. Though they all knew. I just too late to say you're sorry. I would I know why should I care. Please don't bother trying to find her.
She's not there. Well, let me tell you about the way she loved. The way she had turned the color of her. Her voice was soft and cool. Her eyes were clear and bright. But she's not there.
Well, let me tell you about the way she loved. The way she had turned the color of her. Her voice was soft and cool. Her eyes were clear and bright. But she's not there.
Yeah.