Consilium Episode 2: Consciousness and the Kekulé Problem

We emerge from our hiatus with a classic Consilium session, but only the most loyal listeners will know what we mean by this, do you? What ensued was a session going into all sorts of clearly directly related topics, from Lars being exposed as even worse of a German than he already was, to cutting edge insight on modern day sociological phenomena and scathing analysis on that one movie trilogy everyone holds sacred.

Both Hutt and Lars talk some about South Park and how they were respectively exposed to it, leading to the question of what comedy is and what its best nature aims to be.

We have overcome our technological limitations yet again to return with a podcast on the subject of education - or so you'd think, as it eventually evolves into the matters of agency of children in choosing their lifepath and to what extent parents can or can not influence them in this process. Includes accounts of the respective educational systems we grew up within and both passion and apathy are displayed in the process. Try to guess beforehand which was shown by who.

Before Hutt and Lars became friends via twitter and eventually decided to record a podcast, both had their own very different journeys through the internet leading up to this point in time. After sharing those journeys we then talked about the general nature of people who navigate the internet and social media, and whether the ways we go about using the internet are as beneficial to us as they could be.

Without getting too deep into the specific subject of COVID-19, it did prompt this conversation about the different types of freedom that are present or not present in our lives. Eventually we branched out into the subject of Objectivism and how many people, including Hutt, may have been influenced by it through certain books and movies. Brief slander of Game of Thrones Season 8 also ensued.

An essay by Cormac McCarthy regarding the origin of language and the nature of consciousness kicked off the conversation of this episode, which also delved into a potential name for the podcast before we settled on one, the lindy phenomena and the process of getting more in touch with one's emotions.  The essay can be found here: https://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/the-kekul-problem

In this first episode, we talk about the interaction between technology and humanity, questions becoming more and more urgent as transhumanism begins to pick up traction.