#1518: The Socratic Immersive Experience with Agnes Callard and her book “Open Socrates”

If it were up to Agnes Callard, she would be having a lot more philosophical encounters in her life. But conversational norms lean towards agreeability, surface-level interactions, and, in some contexts, a polarizing battlefield of ideologies that is near impossible to penetrate. Her preference is for the Socratic Method of inquiry that requires participants to embody specific roles (believing truths vs avoiding falsehoods), with specific rules to follow, and committing to the possibility of having one’s beliefs or skepticism radically transformed. This allows for the prospect of overcoming blind spots and co-creating knowledge in a collaborative fashion where one thinks with someone rather than thinking for someone. Socratic inquiry doesn’t just happen, so Callard wrote a book called Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life explaining the process in great detail. She even created an entirely new ethical framework arguing that striving for knowledge is a moral imperative per Socrates’ aphorism “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

Callard argues in her book that while achieving knowledge requires following the two rules of believing truths and avoiding falsehoods, it’s impossible for one person to follow both rules simultaneously. To do so requires a collaborative and dialectical process like the Socratic Method. She cites William James’ 1896 The Will to Believe as the source of the insight that believing truths and avoiding falsehoods are apparently two different mutually-exclusive algorithms:

We must know the truth; and we must avoid
error
,—these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two separable laws.

James, W. (1907). The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. page 17. Longmans Green and Co.

For a quick 5-minute overview on why believing truths and avoiding falsehoods are two separate algorithms requiring a dialectical process, check out this short 5-minute video where Callard explains the crux of the Socratic Method:

It’s not immediately obvious to me that the path towards knowledge requires believing truths and avoiding falsehoods, or that it would be impossible for one person to commit to both. If Callard is right, the path towards knowledge requires a collaborative and deliberative process similar to the path towards justice where the prosecution prosecutes the guilty and the defense acquits the innocent. Once again, a lawyer cannot represent both sides, however, in this instance, the debate is mediated by a judge with an independent jury deciding the verdict. Callard contends that pure Socratic Inquiry needs no moderator as long as both parties are open-minded enough to have their blind spots challenged and potentially be radically transformed. What it does require is a good faith commitment to work collaboratively with a certain amount of epistemic humility.

This underlying dialectical nature of knowledge applies in many and varied contexts, especially around conversations focusing on “What is Truth?” or “What is Reality?” Close listeners to the Voices of VR podcast have heard me mention this tension between “believing truths” vs “avoiding falsehoods” in at least a dozen podcasts going back to November 2019 (#846, 860, 912, 927, 932, 959, 971, 1055, 1092, 1144, 1147, & 1353).

Dialectical polarities are a core pillar of my experiential design framework, and I’ve been seeing more immersive stories and experiences use the principles of the Socratic Method as a core mechanic. See my interviews about Horizon (one-on-one Socratic dialogue with an immersive theatre actor within a speculative futures context), Mandala (group Socratic dialectic about philosophical ideas), and The Collider (asymmetrical two-person experience about power and boundaries where one person embodies power-over dynamics with the other embodying power-under).

Callard never explicitly identifies Socratic inquiry as a “Socratic Immersive Experience” within her book, but it’s a phrase we coined together in this conversation because Socratic Inquiry requires a specific contextual set and setting. Now that she’s finished her book, Callard has made it her mission to understand the contextual norms that are blocking us from having philosophical encounters in our lives, and she’s in an exploratory and experimental state where she’d like to bring the magic of the Socratic Method into more people’s lives. Her book Open Socrates is an excellent primer as it exhaustively maps out the underlying principles of Socratic inquiry, but I suspect facilitating philosophical encounters would benefit from experiential design interventions. How to create a “Socratic Immersive Experience” is an exciting open problem with many potential applications, provided makers resolve setting a proper context, onboarding, and transmission of the rules and roles to be played.

In my interview with Callard, we elaborate further on the tension between believing truths and avoiding falsehoods, and also map out some of the underlying experiential design prerequisites to create a context for Socratic inquiry. Callard also gives a quick pitch for how she’s creating an entirely new ethical framework of Socratic Intellectualism with a moral imperative to do more philosophy in our lives to pursue knowledge.

We also unpack some potential philosophical foundations of the underlying dialectical nature of knowledge. I wasn’t able to clearly articulate my insights from Process Philosophy with Callard in this conversation, and so I will add some pointers below. 

I suspect that the seemingly mutually-exclusive dialectic between believing truths and avoiding falsehoods may actually be a mutually-implicative relationship when contextualized within an unfolding process of the Socratic Method. In my second conversation with philosopher Matt Segall, he said, “Wherever [Whitehead] finds dualisms that are getting at some distinction between the two aspects that are being split, he transforms them into polarities… What Whitehead wants to say is maybe we can think of mind and matter or the physical and the mental as phases in a process.” 

Epperson and Zafiris have formalized Whitehead’s idea of a mental pole moving into a physical pole into quantum ontology in their book Foundations of Relational Realism by saying that “physical objects are not merely understood by their fundamental histories, but rather understood as fundamental histories of quantum events.” Moving from the mental pole to physical pole resolves the seemingly mutually exclusive mind-matter dualism between “physical relation” and “conceptual relation.” They explicitly point out how the dualism between “truth” and “falsity” could also be recontextualized as a mutually-implicative relationship when seen in the context of a process, which is similar to what the Socratic Method does to integrate the two separable laws of “know truths” and “avoid errors” from James.

As we will see, in the case of both the Epimenides paradox and quantum mechanics, the root cause of the incoherence is the presumption of a closed totality, within which causal relation and logical implication-and more broadly, physical relation and conceptual relation-are treated as mutual-exclusive categories, as are “truth’ and ‘falsity. The solution we propose in this volume is to instead recognize these as mutually implicative categories within an open totality defined as a history-in-process… And likewise, the philosophy of Whitehead, in the context of this understanding of totality, will provide a solid framework for the coherent relation of the physical and the conceptual, as well as the causal and the logical, as mutually implicative features of nature.

Epperson, M., & Zafiris, E. (2015). Foundations of relational realism: A topological approach to quantum mechanics and the philosophy of nature. page 19. Lexington Books.

Kastner, Kauffman, and Epperson’s paper Taking Heisenberg’s Potentia Seriously also elaborates on how mutually-exclusive relationships can be reinterpreted as mutually-implicative ones when seen within the context of an unfolding process. They say, “However, this is not a dualism of mutually exclusive substances in the classical Cartesian sense, and therefore does not inherit the infamous ‘mind-body’ problem. Rather, res potentia and res extensa are understood as mutually implicative ontological extants.”

For an introductory primer on Process Philosophy, then be sure to check out my first conversation with Whitehead Scholar Matt Segall, and for a deeper dive into the evolution of process-relational thinking from Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche, James, Bergson, Whitehead, Jung, Deleuze, Hillman, to Stengers, then check out my conversation with Grant Maxwell on the mythical dialectic.

The associative link that I’m making back to Socrates is that the seemingly opposite and mutually-exclusive rules of “believing truths” and “avoiding falsehoods” may actually be mutually implicative when considered within the context of a collaborative and dialectical process of the Socratic Method. It’s a subtle point, but an important one considering how easy it is to find oneself firmly entrenched onto one of the polarized sides of a dualism of either a “I Want to Believe” credulous position or an “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” skeptical position. Because the perspectives of the true believers and staunch skeptics are mutually implicative, then the implication is that they must collaborate with an open mind in order to achieve knowledge since neither one can do so in isolation. 

A big reason why Callard’s five-minute video elaborating on the dialectical and process-relational nature of knowledge through the Socratic Method hit me like a lightning bolt in 2019 is because I see the dynamics of mutually-implicative polarities as an underlying philosophical foundation for experiential design and immersive storytelling. It’s a profound truth that William James first made in 1896, and one that may have deeper metaphysical implications when considering relational realism and process philosophy.

Callard points out Socrates had intuitively considered the mutually implicative nature of believing truths and avoiding falsehoods in what she calls his dual nature of being a deconstructive, skeptical “gadfly” finding gaps in his interlocutor’s logic while then becoming a constructive, credulous “midwife” helping to form new perspectives and worldviews. Callard does a masterful job of fully elaborating these points within her Open Socrates book, pointing out the many paradoxes and pitfalls that prevent us from fully surrendering to the process of the Socratic Method and Socratic Inquiry, and giving us an ethical framework, moral imperative, and road map to live a more philosophical life in pursuit of knowledge.

This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.

Music: Fatality

Rough Transcript

[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So in today's episode, I'm going to be talking with Agnes Callard, who's a philosopher who has just published a book called Open Socrates, The Case for a Philosophical Life. So I first came across Agnes's work back in 2019, where she's giving like a five minute pitch for the book that she was working on, where she was describing the Socratic method as this dialectical process that is trying to achieve knowledge. And that in order to do that, you need to believe truths and avoid falsehoods. But the catch is that these are mutually exclusive algorithms and that one person can't do both of the algorithms at the same time. And so the solution is that you have the Socratic method where it's a dialectic where one person embodies believing truths and the other embodies avoid falsehoods, and they collaborate in this journey towards knowledge. That's an idea that she cites originally came from William James' The Will to Believe. But it's something that really has come up a lot in the conversations around what is truth, what is reality. But also as I go into these different immersive experiences, I find that the really compelling ones are ones that are engaging in this dialectical process of holding two archetypal principles together. And I, as an experiencer, make choices and take action and navigate the boundaries between like, say, power and boundaries. Or, you know, there's these deeper principles of these dialectics. And so... I had a chance to talk to Agnes about the Socratic method and deeper elaboration of Believe and Choose, Avoiding Falsehoods, but also what's it take to create a context for which these types of philosophical encounters can happen? This Socratic immersive experience where You have to be open-minded. There has to be certain rules that are in place. And it's not something that you can just dive into. And for Agnes, she just wants to have these philosophical conversations like all the time. And so she's developed a whole ethical framework around the Socratic method so that this pursuit of knowledge is a part of a deeper ethical impulse. And she's actively exploring what's it take to cultivate more and more of these philosophical encounters through this Socratic inquiry or just embodying the principles of the Socratic method. So that's what we're coming on today's episode of Voices VR Podcast. So this interview with Agnes happened on Saturday, January 18th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and die right in.

[00:02:32.424] Agnes Callard: Hi, I'm Agnes Callard. I am a philosopher. I teach at the University of Chicago, and my research focus is in contemporary ethics and moral psychology on the one hand, and then ancient philosophy on the other. I also run the undergrad program here at Chicago in philosophy, and I do lots of public philosophy, public-facing work.

[00:02:55.558] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into philosophy. Sure.

[00:03:00.509] Agnes Callard: Sure. I am originally from Hungary. I came to this country with my parents when I was five years old. This is like 1980, 1981. And I then grew up sort of in New York City, partly in Hungary, went back there over the summers. I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago and then went to graduate school in Berkeley in classics, actually, to study Greek and Latin, and then eventually abandoned that in favorite philosophy. And this is my first job at the University of Chicago. I've been here for 15 years. And I just wrote a book, which is my first trade book called Open Socrates, The Case for a Philosophical Life, which is sort of both at the same time, a book about who Socrates is and why he's important and also a book about why philosophy is important and what it is.

[00:03:49.398] Kent Bye: Can you talk about your first encounter with Socrates and what was it that drew you to what he was saying and what he was doing?

[00:03:58.073] Agnes Callard: I wasn't drawn to it. My first encounter with Socrates was a high school student. I was a high school debater. And I loved a debate. I was in a debate team. In fact, eventually I was the captain of my team, but I was not good at debate. That is, I didn't win debates. If that's your measure of being good at debate, I was not good. I was very enthusiastic. I sort of made up an enthusiasm for my lack of success. I was made captain of my team, even though I was not winning more than 50% of debates, which is not a good ratio. And at one point I learned that someone told me you could win more debates if you put quotes into your speeches from this thing called philosophy. There's this thing called philosophy. And if you insert it into your speeches, you'll sound better. And then maybe you'll start winning. You know, I wanted. And so I went to Barnes & Noble and I went to the philosophy section. I got one of each book. You know, there was Plato and Aristotle and Kant and Mill and Rawls and Nozick. I got one of each and I read through them all. And I read Plato, Plato's Republic, and I thought, that's okay. I don't think it's so great to create a society where you're just doing a bunch of lies to people, but all right, moving on to Aristotle. That's a conch. And I was like, this is it. This is amazing. This guy just figured it all out. He just got all the answers. I was puzzled as to why there was any philosophy after him, because I thought he just solved all the problems. And so I became a Kantian. And I thought, you know, Plato was like this kind of like first attempt that Kant perfected the story. And it was really when I got to college and I had to force to take a humanities class and We read Plato's Apology, we read some earlier Socratic dialogues, because the Republic is really Plato rather than Socrates, at least after book one. But reading more Socratic dialogues, especially the Mino, I suddenly started to see the revolutionary character of Socrates, which hadn't come into view in the Republic before. Because throughout most of the Republic, actually, he sort of doesn't behave the way Socrates usually behaves. And I realized that there was something that Socrates was doing. He was like putting a new option on the table for people where in some way that new option was thinking. And that I came to credit my own like excitement over debate and interest in philosophy and all of that. I'm like, oh, all of that is something that he got started. But there wasn't some moment where that change happened. It was just sort of happened over the course of, let's say, my first two years at UChicago. Then I became obsessed with Socrates. I decided I wanted to learn Greek so I could read the dialogues in Greek. You know, I study Greek history. I read Xenophon. I read Aristophanes. I read all the dialogues. I took all these classes. on platonic dialogues from different, some of them in classics, some of them in philosophy, some of them in the committee on social thought. I remember I took a really hard class on the Parmenides. I just did not understand anything that happened in my class. And in all of these classes, we were kind of interpreting the dialogues and especially a lot of my teachers, I was at University of Chicago, a lot of my teachers were Straussians or taught by Straussians. And so their basic ethos was like, you have to pick apart the text at a very high level of detail to find like secret messages hidden in the text. You know, the text is supposed to be protecting itself from the ordinary reader, but you want to be the extraordinary reader who can find those secret messages. And so I very much wanted to be that extraordinary reader who could find the secret messages in the text. And the fact that that little gamification was added on to the reading of the Socratic dialogues really appealed to me.

[00:07:10.939] Kent Bye: Okay, well, it was back in 2019 when I was traveling to Amsterdam for IFA Doc Lab, and I was watching a YouTube channel called Philosophy Overdose, which was clips of videos from other places. And there's a five-minute clip of you talking about the Socratic method that I believe originally came from a half-hour video from Aon Video. But... I saw that clip and it really incepted my brain for the last five years. I went back and I've referenced that conversation at least a dozen times and even more times in social media and in conversations. I found it was such a profound insight around the core essence of the Socratic method of being these two competing algorithms of believing truths and avoiding falsehoods. And then at some point you had realized that they were not the same thing. And that in order to get to knowledge, you had to have this dialectical process of different people embodying those different aspects. And so I was waiting for a long time to get this book. And I'm very happy to see the full elaboration on that and see how much you've really expanded out into even more of like a ethical framework around that beyond epistemological ideas that inspired me for so long. And so I'm wondering, when did you realize that believing truths and avoiding falsehoods were two separate, almost mutually exclusive algorithms?

[00:08:26.340] Agnes Callard: I actually think it was when I read James's Will to Believe. So I really needed James's help to understand Socrates. There had been something that was intriguing me about Socrates for a very long time, but I had trouble putting my finger on it. And I felt very dissatisfied with the literature, you know, the secondary literature that would sort of explain who Socrates was and what he was doing and what he was up to. The thing that made me dissatisfied by is the thing that I call the gadfly midwife paradox in my book, which is that basically he was either presented as a gadfly or as a midwife. And nobody was sort of reconciling that there were these two facets to who he was. There just wasn't a theory. There wasn't even really an acknowledgement that there was a problem there. But I didn't find the resources for analyzing that situation in the Socratic texts or even in the commentary in the Socratic texts, as much of that stuff as I've read. It was really in this James essay that doesn't talk about Socrates at all, but is the kind of foundational text for pragmatism. And is trying to come to terms with, I mean, for James, it's really something like a tension between a scientific and a pragmatic approach to life, where he wants to insist that there are these pragmatic contexts, like befriending someone and wanting them to trust you and how you have to maybe trust them in order for them to trust you. And that like the logic of how that works is different from how we want our minds to operate in a scientific context, according to James. So he's defending that in the context of defending the will to believe, which is to say this special set of rules that apply in this pragmatic context. He is pointing out that there are these two sets of rules. And I quote him in my book because I'm like, here it is. He's the one who says it. So I give him credit. But I read that for the first time when I was already a faculty member at UChicago. I hadn't read it as an undergrad. I hadn't read James in grad school. He's not a popular author for philosophers to read these days.

[00:10:21.980] Kent Bye: And so this dialectic between believing truths and avoiding falsehoods, I feel like it's such a profound insight that those are not the same thing. And that I often find people that are either skeptics that are like trying to avoid those falsehoods or people who are believing some idea and more of a religious faith-based context to belief. And so, could you elaborate on how knowledge requires belief because a lot of people would think that knowledge is coming from facts and empiricism and like there's a certain way that you know it's true, but maybe you could just elaborate like, why is belief, a core part of knowledge.

[00:11:05.111] Agnes Callard: Yeah. So maybe I'll even just start with laying out how those things come into tension with each other, because we kind of haven't said that. So you might think that the goal of our cognitive life is going to be to believe true things and avoid believing false things. And you might have thought that those were just two ways of describing one and the same thing, because it's certainly true that if you succeed in believing false a truth about some matter, then you have therefore succeeded in avoiding believing anything false about it, because whatever is true isn't false. So in believing a truth, you have avoided a falsehood. And that's, I think, what can lead us to the illusion that these are just one and the same command. To believe a truth, you have to have avoided believing a falsehood. And that's right. That's right. If we look at it retrospectively, like suppose I have believed the truth, it's also the case that I have avoided falsehood. But let's say that instead of looking at it retrospectively, we look at it prospectively. That is, we have some claim P and I can either believe P. Right. Or I cannot believe it. And suppose that I want to have a truth. That is, my fundamental goal is have some truth. Well, then I should either believe it or maybe I should believe not P, but I better believe something or other, because if I don't believe anything, then I will decisively fail at the project of having a truth. But suppose that my fundamental goal is to avoid a falsehood. That is, I want whatever else. I want to just avoid the pollution of false belief. And this is the view put forward by Clifford. James's The Will to Believe is really a response to Clifford's Ethics of Belief, which argues the opposite side, which says, never be pragmatic, always be scientific. And Clifford is saying, look, your fundamental imperative, your fundamental epistemic imperative is avoid falsehoods. Do everything to avoid falsehoods. But that means suspend judgment, always, but everything, like unless you're absolutely certain. And you're not going to have many truths in that situation. You will succeed in avoiding falsehoods. but at the cost of not having any truth. So it looks like if you are a hardcore avoid falsehooder, you're going to suspend judgment most of the time and you're not going to have many truths. Whereas if you're a hardcore have truther, then you're going to take the risk of believing a bunch of things that might be wrong because that way at least you stand a chance at having a truth. And so it looks like these two rules, have truths, avoid falsehoods, are in tension with one another viewed prospectively. Okay, that's the basic thought. Now, why is it the knowledge requires both? Well, let's take the have truths idea, right? So say that I want to have a truth. It's really important to me to have a truth. And so I'm just going to believe P. Maybe I'm right. Maybe P turns out to be true. So I've got it. I've got the truth. But because I haven't taken proper care to form my belief in P by way of the avoidance of falsehood, I don't think that we can say that what I have is knowledge. In effect, if you just guessed, even if you're right, it's not knowledge. So we've got standards for calling something knowledge, and it's not any old belief that we're going to call knowledge, not even any old true belief. So somebody who happens to have a bunch of correct scientific beliefs, but can't give you any of the reasons for them and has no training is not like a scientist. All right, so that shows you why you can't just have truths in order to have knowledge. You have to follow the other rule to avoid falsehood. And now let's try the other way. Couldn't you just be sure to avoid falsehood? And I think here, there's a couple of different things to say, but one of them is to sort of notice that it seems like any serious epistemic project where you're taking on, let's say, a research question, like you're trying to find a cure for a disease or you're trying to find the origin cause of some historical event or whatever, the way that it's gonna work for you is that you're gonna have some hypothesis. You're gonna have some possible account of how it might work. And that's what you're gonna have to look into, right? You can't look into everything all at once. We have to look into some particular, like, okay, maybe DNA has this structure. Let's test that theory. But to do that is, it's like you have to have a truth, in effect. You have to have some commitment. You have to have some thought that this is how it is. And now we are already off and running in the direction of bias. That is, you want that account to turn out to be right, and you're going to not be as effective at looking at reasons why they might be wrong as somebody who has no stake in the matter. And so here's a place where I criticize James, because I think James says, oh, we can be Cliffordians about science. But if you actually look at how scientists conduct science, it's not in a Cliffordian way. They're not just like, I'll sit here and wait until the evidence comes in. No, they step out there and they're like, here's something that might be true. Let me try to defend it. And let's see if anyone shoots it down, right? And that actually scientists are not Cliffordians about science. The rest of us might be Cliffordians about science, right? I might be like, well, I'll wait until the evidence rolls in before I make a decision about is light a particle or a wave or something like that. But if there's someone who's like, no, it's a particle, that person's not going to be a Cliffordian. And so those of us who have no personal investment in science We can be Cliffordians about science, but scientists themselves have a personal investment. So it looks like you can't be a Cliffordian about anything that really matters to you. I think you can be a Cliffordian about some things. And I sort of argue this in the chapter. I think you can be a Cliffordian about anything where what you're saying about it is, I'm just curious. So I'm just curious is a mark of a Cliffordian context. And what you mean when you say I'm just curious is like, I don't have any attachment to any specific hypothesis. I'm willing to stand back and let the evidence roll in. And I'm not going to do anything with this information so that I'm not like counting on it to fall out one way rather than another. Right. That's I'm just curious. So there we can be Laforteans. But many, many things we think we're not just curious about. And then we run into the problem.

[00:16:56.409] Kent Bye: Hmm. Yeah, I do a lot of work seeing different immersive experiences in the context of VR. Sometimes the use mediated through technology. Sometimes I'm at a festival and it's just a one-on-one conversation and more of like an immersive theater type of context. And what I am picking up on in some of your work and how it ties into what I've been looking at is the ways in which artists and creators can bring about change in someone's beliefs or worldviews, or they see an experience and they come out of it changed. And it feels to me in some ways that Socratic inquiry where you have two people who are open to possibilities, who are somehow investigating what you term like an untimely question or a question that doesn't have an easy answer, it demands to be answered, that it could end up being like the ultimate immersive experiences engaging in that type of Socratic inquiry where either your worldview is completely transformed in some way or the other person who's engaging with you, you're able to convince them. And so you both have to be willing to transcend the limitations of your perspective, but also include the perspectives of the other person. And I feel like that's, Kind of like the ideal type of political dialogue that we could be having in our world and the country right now, but everything is so locked in and polarized into a specific perspective that it feels kind of rare these days to really get into being willing to let go of certain aspects of your core beliefs. which you elaborate in other paradoxes that you get into. So I'm wondering if you could flesh out what are some of the core requirements for two people to engage within a Socratic inquiry using the Socratic method?

[00:18:38.018] Agnes Callard: So, yeah, so I'm going to answer your question, like what are the requirements? But even before I do that, I've just found the way you were putting it about like the immersive experience and the possibilities for change that the immersive experience opens up really interesting. So I just want to reflect on that for a minute because the thing I've been thinking about coming out of this book. So my book basically argues we should be doing more philosophy. We should kind of be doing philosophy all the time. We should be having philosophical conversations all the time. But the truth is we don't do that. We don't have them. Philosophers don't have them. Professional philosophers don't. do not have philosophical conversations, except when it's like officially sanctioned, they're in a classroom, they're giving a talk, et cetera. Like those contexts, they'll do it. Like even when they're with other professional philosophers, like the dinner after the talk is typically not philosophical. This shocked me. Like I kept thinking like, oh, I'll just explain how I want the dinner after my talk to be philosophical, but I'll explain it in the talk. Like, I would do that. And still, it's just like, you can't do it, right? And that's just really weird to me. And it's something that behooves me to explain. That is, other people are like, yeah, that's because people don't like philosophy that much. Nobody wants to do it. Revealed preference. And I'm like, no, what is secretly standing in the way of this thing that we all secretly actually really want deep down inside, but we're not able to do it. And so I've been pondering this question. And one way to put it is that you can do this only inside of a certain kind of immersive experience. It's kind of hard to set up that structure. And it's like a conversation is like a bubble. It's like a little world that is governed by its own set of rules. And the philosophical version of that conversation is, has its own special set of rules that's a little bit different from, we can think of it this way. Step one is like, there's the rules that govern our social world in general. Like imagine you're at a train station or something. There's all kinds of rules that govern, okay, the train's coming and going and the signs, what's gonna be on the signs and people's movements. But imagine there's two people having conversation in the train station. That conversation is then governed by like a separate set. It's a bubble, it's its own little world. There's gonna be things that they do like we're nicer in conversation than we are to each other than like behind our backs where we go out of our way to be friendly approachable to like give signs of like you're giving lots of signs of agreement we do that in conversation we try to make it clear when we agree in ways that like if there's just someone out there like i don't care whether i agree with them right but if i'm talking to someone we're tracking agreement very tightly we're coordinating very tightly. Like we are incredibly quick to respond, especially people who know each other, like you and me. So like you respond to stuff I do in like two-tenths of a second. It slowed down a little bit by Zoom, so Zoom creates problems for this. But two-tenths of a second is faster than your brain can process the signal that comes at the end of what I say. So what that means is that you're predicting, like while I'm talking, you're predicting that you're going to agree with me at a certain point. And so, you know, that's how you can do that response at the correct time. So it's an incredibly complicated little world of responses that one sociologist contrasted with schoolboy rules like he's saying outside the conversation there are schoolboy rules and what that means is like people get what they deserve and if they earn praise maybe they'll get it but if they didn't earn it they'll get a spanking or whatever we don't spank each other in conversation we don't make sure the other person deserves the praise that we're like oh it's so great to see you it's nice oh i hope we see each other again soon like all that stuff we're not lying but we're just like easy with praise like effusive of it So it's like this little like safe bubble, safe space is what a conversation is from like the other kind of world of the train station where like if you jump in front of a train, it's just going to smash you. And that's already an immersive experience of a certain kind, right? The ordinary social conversation. And it's an experience that really matters to people. They really care a lot about having these like one-on-one interactions, feeling seen, feeling connected to other people. And the philosophical experience is like layered on top of that or found inside of it or whatever, but it's its own kind of immersive experience that's somewhat in tension with the rules of sociability, because it's got to be organized in a very specific way that is not the natural organization of that interaction. So, you know, it's organized as, look, there's one person who's following James's rule, which is have truths. And there's another person who is following Clifford's rule, which is do not accept falsehoods. And the person who's following James's rule is the answerer. So it's their job to have an answer. Whatever the asker asks, the Cliffordian is the asker. Whatever the asker asks, as the Jamesian, you've got to have an answer. So a lot of times people are very critical of Socrates' interlocutors. And they say, these people are so arrogant. They always like assume they know stuff. And it's like Socrates is setting them up in that position. He wants them to like give him an answer. Like, you know, just try, guess, whatever. Have a truth. That's your role. You've got to have some truth. Right. So they've got to put something forward. And then the Cliffordian, which is the Socratic role, that person's job is to examine it, which is to say, ask questions about it and to explain why it's not up to par. I can't accept it. I'm trying to avoid falsehood. And my goal of avoiding falsehood requires me to avoid this. And, you know, in that kind of interaction, there may well be an agreement at the end of the day, but there's a kind of avoidance of premature agreement. And I think socially, we're kind of in the opposite position, which is that we are gravitationally pulled towards premature agreement. And when we don't get there, we want to break off the interaction and be like, I guess you're my enemy. I guess you're evil. I guess you hate me. So agreement is functioning so much as like the thing that structures the little world of the interaction itself. that an encounter that requires tolerance for a lot of delays of agreement is gonna threaten the like unity of the encounter itself when it comes to politics you're asking why is it so hard to do like so i think we can ask when can we do this sort of thing that is when can we do this sort of socratic encounter and it's not going to be at the train station that is at the train station like when we meet someone that we're picking up or something Where she'd be like, oh, it's so great to see you. It's great to see you too. How was your trip? Like, when did you leave? I was just in London for like just a couple of days. And I answered the question, when did you get here and when will you leave? Like 50 times. I think that's not an exaggeration. I think I answered it around 50 times. Everyone I met asked me, when did you get here? When will you leave? and like at a certain point i actually it was so many times that i was just cracking up when i would get it the next time and obviously the person doesn't understand why i'm cracking up to them it's a totally reasonable question right but it's just like i feel like a robot answering this question i'm like do you care like does it really matter we're not gonna hang out again after this either way right the fact that i'm not i'm leaving tomorrow i'm leaving a week from now wouldn't make a difference but look that's how that goes right like that's how they're saying i'm categorizing you as an interaction partner in terms of the fact that you're a foreigner who's here for a specified amount of time and that's part of the structure of our interaction that determines that anyway so no we're not going to have a philosophical conversation we're going to determine when did i come and when am i going to leave and you might say the thing about politics is that there's actually just a lot of that that goes hung like it's not when did you come when you leave but like which group do you belong to who are your allies what are the strategies you're using to get at your allies all of that it takes the place of when did you get here and when are you going to leave and so it's like there's no space for doing this other kind of thing that requires a very specific organization of interaction roles that is not the default one that we have.

[00:25:59.496] Kent Bye: Yeah. And it feels like that through the course of a number of different immersive experiences, I feel like I've had like these Socratic moments where there was an immersive interactive experience that was challenging or provoking me in a way that was deeply moving or provocative. And I feel like a movie or a book or listening to a podcast could have that same effect, but I'm not quite sure if that is living into the pure essence of the Socratic method, meaning that there's kind of a structure or a form under which that type of exchange happens. And as we think around these different types of contexts that these conversations could happen, you know, you could have it mediated in a social VR experience where there's another person or an immersive theater context where there's another person or You could attempt to create a AI agent using a large language model and have a certain amount of bounds and having this agent interact with you, trying to evoke the spirit of a Socratic dialogue. But I don't know if you'd be necessarily like looking into the soul of the other person on the other side, which is kind of a moment that you Reference in your book where Socrates is defining what the essence of the Socratic method is that you're actually with another person who is open to these possibilities. And so that's part of this line of inquiry of what are the preconditions to create this? Because does it really require someone there live as a person doing it? Or is this something you imagine in the future we could start to have? some sort of technologically mediated modes of this, or if that would be really against the spirit of what you see the Socratic inquiry being, because part of that opportunity is that you could be changed or the person that you're talking to could be changed. And if it's with some sort of algorithm or with some sort of like mediated way, they're not afforded the same possibility of where you could actually change them in a way that a Socratic inquiry could be. So it feels like there's a magic of those possibilities with a true Socratic inquiry, where I'm somewhat skeptical that we might be able to capture the spirit of that within technology. But even with reading your book, there were certain moments when even Socrates was asking these questions of either in the gadfly mode of deconstructing or in the more constructing and midwifing and facilitating new possibilities of new worldviews. So I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on some of the other contextual requirements for what you think is a requirement in order to really have a true Socratic inquiry.

[00:28:28.274] Agnes Callard: Yeah, good. So actually something I had meant to say in response to your first comment about the immersion is that what the Socratic immersive experience is supposed to give you, I think, is it's supposed to make it feel socially okay for you to think with someone else. And As much as we think we're doing that all the time, actually, that's the thing we really struggle to do. That is, each of us sees ourselves as a mind, which is to say, as something that is capable of thinking on its own terms. We think of ourselves as thinkers, and that's a really deep part of what it is to have self-respect, is that I can work things through with my mind. I have this tool that can solve intellectual problems. And because we have that self-conception, when someone else comes and they want to think with us, we often will experience that as someone who's trying to think instead of us. That is, they're trying to mentally replace us. And it will become combative. And then it's like a question of who wins, right? Who gets to be the thinker in the room? And so the magic of a Socratic interaction, when it really works, is that someone is thinking with you and you don't experience that it's a competition or as an attempt to squash you from being the thinker or as an attempt to replace you as the thinker. And that's the point of all of this structure is to like allow for that, for two minds to work together, because that's the only solution we've got to the James Clifford problem. Otherwise, we're trading off or taking turns, which is what James wanted. James thought that was a solution. We'll just do Cliffordianism with science and we'll do Jamesianism with ethics or something. And I criticize that. I'm like, that doesn't work. We've got to do both for both. And so we actually do have to figure out how to put these two things together. And the Socratic answer is two people working together. But that means they have to overcome the difficulty of only being half a mind. And the immersive context is supposed to allow for that. Okay. Now, I think that you're right that like a movie or a book or other kinds of immersive experience, they can offer you sort of ways of sidelining your own mind that feel okay. Like when I'm in a movie, I forget that I'm me. I forget that I'm part of the picture, right? I'm seeing these characters and I'm seeing what's going on there or reading a novel. It's like, we have forms of entertainment that make the elimination of the place that is normally occupied by my mind feel okay to me and that's like cultural technology that we've created like if you think about okay so as you maybe can tell I'm like I've been just reading a lot of sociology of conversation literature since the book came out because I'm interested in this problem of why aren't we having these more conversations and one of the interesting things that sociologists study is the use of stories so if let's say you and I are in a big group of people One of the things that can happen in the conversation is one of us can tell a story, but there are really special rules. There are rules that govern every interaction and what is allowed to be put forward in a conversation. But like right now, if I were to just be like, let me tell you a story, that'd be like, well, no, no, no, you can't just do that, right? That there's very special circumstances under which you're allowed to introduce a story and you need permission. Like even that... I can't even ask you to tell you a story. Even let me tell you a story wouldn't work here. I would need to be like, let me illustrate this point by telling you a story. That would be okay. My story is tied in. That's interesting. It's interesting that we need permission and excuses and buy-in to tell a story, not for any other kind of speech act. I can just make points to you. Right now, I'm making points. I'm not asking for your permission to make these points, but if I were going to tell a story, I'd be like, I want to tell you a story. I'd pause, allow you to maybe interrupt and say, no, I don't have time to hear your stories. And also, if I tell you a story, especially if we're in a big group, it's very likely going to be like, other people are going to get to tell their stories. Like, look, if I'm going to tell a story, then you get to tell a story, and she gets to tell a story. I'm not going to be the only one that gets to tell a story. Okay, like, why is all that? I actually have not gotten a good answer from the sociologist, but I have my own thoughts about There's a sense in which when I'm telling a story, I'm like the only person in the room. Like, here's my life. I'm like smooshing my perspective over everybody's like mental landscape in much the way as what happens when you read a novel or watch a movie, except I'm not a novelist. I'm not a filmmaker. So I'm actually not going to be as good at... finessing that obliteration of your perspective you're kind of going to be aware that like you're sitting there listening to my story and it's going on for a while when's she going to get to the point you know well like i get why this is related to the point that she's making but i get the point now she can stop i have a podcast with this economist robin hansen and he's like constantly doing this when i'm telling stories he's like okay okay you can just i don't even need to hear the rest of the story i get the point right he's really impatient with stories because he's like Oh, look, I'm just indulging you, spewing your mental life onto me, right? And he's like, I'm a mind. I get to think. Like, what's my turn to think? Okay. So this is like the one way or something immersive experience that we get in a movie or through a novel that takes a lot of... craftsmanship for us to be okay with it. And ordinary people are not good enough at telling stories to just be allowed to do that with impunity at any social situation precisely because they're not, what they will be doing is the other person will be like, you're taking over my mind. You're colonizing me. So now we ask about the AI, right? Or like, can that other be something other than a human being? I think in principle, absolutely yes. Like, so I'm not, I think a lot of philosophers are like incredibly skeptical of the thought that AI could ever be a possible interlocutor for a human being. that there's something like essential about humanity that makes us able to do philosophy only with each other. I don't feel that way. I think it's like pretty likely that philosophy is going to stay at human interaction for quite some time, but that's not for in principle reasons. Like I think you could have a human being that was not made out of neurological stuff, but made out of like silicone or something like a human being, a thinker. Right. I don't think we essentially have to be made out of cells, but yeah, I've tried to do philosophy with ChatGPT. And, you know, I read an interesting blog post by this philosopher, Rebecca Lowe, who's like, ChatGPT now is pretty good at philosophy, the new version. You know, it can make insightful points and stuff. And I think that that's right. Like a lot of my experience was with earlier versions. But even with the new version, there's something for me that's missing, which is like a certain kind of like tension and excitement in the interaction that I think boils down to the problem is that Chachi Peachy does not want anything. It does not want to know anything. It's just very helpful to me. But like when sometimes other human beings are like that, other human beings are like, they're just trying to be helpful. It's like somewhere that's quite dull and quite flat. It's like, I have a sense of talking to you. You have your motives for being in this conversation, right? You have things you wanna know. There's ways in which the ideas in my book are going to play out for you in what you do. And so I'm like encountering like another mind in that sense, in the sense of a mind that has its own conception of the good and is drawn to that goodness. And I think that that's part of the philosophical encounter And so the AIs are really going to have to level up quite a bit to get to that stage of having a desire in order for us to feel like we can trust them with being the other half of our mind.

[00:35:29.266] Kent Bye: Hmm. Yeah, the way I was also thinking about it is that sometimes a human creator can embed their intention into a piece of art, an immersive experience, and that you are encountering the AI agent and it ends up being like a proxy for that human intention. The best art pieces is when I feel that intention that comes through. And when I think around the essence of story and immersive experience, it ends up being like these tensions of building and releasing these tensions. And I end up at some point had really got onto this idea of dialectics as a core part of building and releasing of tension and music. And I feel like part of the Socratic method also has that dialectical process where I I've looked to other philosophy like Hegel has the thesis, antithesis, and the synthesis. Jung has this idea of you hold the tension of the opposites until you have the reconciling third. Ken Wilber talks around transcending and including where you're able to transcend the limitations of your perspective and include the other positive aspects of someone else's perspective. But there's also the girdle incompleteness that I come back to again and again, where there seems to be like a fundamental incompleteness Well, you can either have completeness or consistency, but not both. And so I feel like there's something around the inability for you to solve both the problems of avoiding falsehoods and believing truths. It feels like it's kind of a girdle and completeness, like you could only do one or the other. And that part of the Socratic method is creating these two formal systems that have that incompleteness. Part of the incompleteness theory is there was things that were true that they knew were true, but they couldn't be proven to be true within the constraints of that formal system. And so when you have two people engaging, it feels like these two girdle incompleteness agents being able to see the blind spots and the other perspective and able to complete each other. And I'm not sure if you have kind of integrated or really thought around the deeper aspects philosophical principles around this kind of incompleteness and how that is being applied to the Socratic method?

[00:37:34.367] Agnes Callard: So I think that it's relevant here that this is a question about process, not product. That is the thing I said earlier about how if you have a truth, and you know you have the truth, then you know you've avoided falsity and you've satisfied both of the rules. That's product, right? And the problem comes with the fact that when we're on our way to that, we don't know whether what we've got here is the truth or whether what we've avoided might actually be a truth when we've avoided it in the thought that it could be false. And that's what makes me think we're kind of in different territory from good and incompleteness, which is going to apply to like the finished system just as much as the path to that system. So, you know, Socrates' view is that, look, once you have knowledge, yeah, you're going to follow both these rules all the time, all by yourself without any help. You have no need for other people. Last night I did an event on the book and someone was like, but like, what's your need for other people once you have knowledge? Like, why would you even care about other people at that point? And it's like, you wouldn't. You have no need for them. And that's exactly why Socrates thinks that when somebody comes to him who purports to have knowledge, he's like, it's amazing that you're so willing to talk to me. And like, you should be making me pay you for this because like, what are you getting out of it? So I think that the deeper thing might be that we're trying to get knowledge. We're trying to come to an understanding of how things are. But from a position of ignorance. And that means that we don't know what we're doing. We're ignorant. So we're going to screw it up. And so it's like, how do you get knowledge from a place of ignorance? How is it that you're not screwing up the pursuit of knowledge all the time because of your ignorance? Like, you don't know which is the right answer. So how are you going to get the right answer? You can't judge which is the right answer. If you could judge which is the right answer, you'd have the right answer. And so this is where you can sort of see the gadfly midwife point that gets analyzed in James Clifford terms, actually just morphing into Mino's paradox, right? Where the thought is like, how do I move forward? How do I look? Either I know, in which case I already know, and there's no poison to acquire, or I don't know and I'm lost. I'm like at sea. I don't even know which way to go. I wouldn't even know the right answer if it hit me in the face, right? And so, you know, certainly I think Plato thinks that. Mina's paradox is like the deep root here, that it looks like there's just a difficulty about how do we ask questions as opposed to solve problems? How do we inquire into something when we're not even sure what it is we want to know or what it would be to have the answer? Because what we want, what we're after is the answer such that we can't say what we want until we have the answer. Like we'll have it once we have it. Like, I guess I think that to me is the deep structure. And it's a structure about a process. It's a problem about how a certain activity is possible, not about how a certain system is constructible.

[00:40:29.847] Kent Bye: Yeah, and one of the branches of philosophy that I've been really drawn to is process philosophy and Alfred North Whitehead, and there's relational reality that is looking at quantum ontology. And one of the things that I came across that I saw some parallels to was this idea of what's possible versus what's actual. And that there's this possibility and those possibilities become actual. And that there's a paper talking around Heisenberg's potentia by Ruth Kastner, Michael Epperson, and Kaufman. And they are suggesting that we take Heisenberg's idea of potentia seriously, which is that he sees it more of mutually implicative. Like you can't have one without the other. And one of the parallels that I saw was that it was Socrates, you know, this idea of refutation, but also construction that those were actually from his perspective, the same thing of like this process of avoiding those falsehoods and deconstructing being the gadfly and then being the midwife and constructing and being someone who is helping to facilitate those potential new perspectives that in some ways from his perspective, he didn't see them as different, but he was equating them. And so, um, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this tension between whether they're mutually exclusive or whether they're mutually implicative where you can't really have the one without the other.

[00:41:49.375] Agnes Callard: So, so I just, you're, you're, you're asking me questions where there's just like a big black hole of ignorance for me. Like, I don't know about whitehead. I don't know what process philosophy is. And I don't, I don't really know much about Heisenberg. Like my kind of like high school understanding was that there's some kind of a problem with sort of determining like, what is it, the position and the velocity of a particle at the same time that like, if you want to find out one of those things, it gets in the way of finding out the other, something like that.

[00:42:17.984] Kent Bye: In this case, it was more towards the quantum wave function where there's like a range of possibilities, what's possible. And then those possibilities get collapsed into what's actual. And I think there's a philosophy, Everett has this idea that everything that's actual has to be in parallel universes. And then so- The idea that the possibility gets collapsed into what's actual, and that Kastner, Kaufman, and Epperson are saying is just that you shouldn't just see substance metaphysics, that the only basis of reality is the physical reality, and that there's something around the possibilities and those mathematical potentias are also an equal ontologically true. You have to have those as well. And so... There's this kind of like idea of dialectics being polar opposite. But if you shift the context, like dialectical process where they're two sides of the same coin in some ways. I was picking up specifically when Socrates was saying that he was equating these two things rather than seeing them as different. And most of us would see them as different. But yeah, so it was just kind of like this mutually exclusive versus mutually implicative. So that's the gist of the question, I guess.

[00:43:27.025] Agnes Callard: So it seems to me like the philosopher that would be your friend is David Lewis. So David Lewis's view is modal realism, which is that all the possible worlds are real worlds. They're not the actual world. They're a different world from the actual world, but they're real. So he's sort of separating... Like a lot of us who are trained based in Aristotle would connect actual and real and Lewis pulled those things apart. And that's what the people you're talking about are sort of doing something similar to that. But I think that is pretty different from the idea that all these different like quantum possibilities of where the particle could be, that they're all like equally real. I mean, for Lewis, he's not talking about quantum phenomena. He's talking about anytime you could have done something, you know, I could have worn a different shirt. To this interview, Lewis is like, well, you did wear a different shirt in another possible world. That's just what that means. He's giving you a semantics of could have sentences, right? And a metaphysics to go with it. So it will certainly cover your sorts of cases with particles. It's going to cover a lot more than that. I think that what Socrates is saying is actually those two things are actually just one thing, not that they're somehow entangled or one entails the other. Like in the way that the road from A to B is the same thing. It's one and the same thing as the road from B to A. There's only one road there. There's not two roads that are somehow entangled. both equally on metaphysical footing in different possible worlds or something like that. There's just one, but you might not have realized that at first. So I once took a Greek class. It was a very stressful time in my life because I was having to learn like a ton of Greek at one and the same, like in short period is when I was first learning Greek. I took this class and it was in this building that was like, it was like a labyrinthine. And so I was very stressed about not getting to my classroom through this building. And so like I had like, just very specific planned route of how to get to the classroom. And then we had class in the morning and then we had another class in the afternoon. And one day I observed to someone in the class, isn't it weird how the morning classroom and the afternoon classroom are so similar to each other, except for that there's a poster. It's the same poster in both rooms, but it's on the opposite side of the room in the afternoon classroom. And the person looked at me like I was completely insane. He's like, it's the same room. And what I've been doing is I'd had a very specific route for getting to the morning classroom. And I had another route that I'd used to get to the afternoon classroom. I sat on the opposite side of the room and I thought there were two rooms, right? And at some point someone had to be like, no, there's only just the one room that you were in the whole time. It's just, you looked at it the one way and you had one set of associations with it in the morning room and you looked at the other way. And I think for Socrates, that's what, refutation and construction are just one of the same process, but it's just hard for us to see that the same thing is going on, partly because we're often like occupying different roles within it. And so like looking at different sides of the elephant or something like that. And so we don't see that it's just one elephant.

[00:46:18.697] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think there's another part of how things are constantly in flux and constantly developing that is, to me, also reminds me of a lot of the Heraclitus, like you can't step in the same river twice. There's like a destabilization that I sensed when I was reading this book in the sense of you have to allow yourself to have an open enough mind to be radically transformed. So I guess the way to phrase that into a question is to go back to this question of like, if you provide someone an invitation to engage in a type of Socratic inquiry, first of all, is that even possible? Because you're putting out a number of conditions of like timely versus untimely questions of like it can only happen in certain moments or an invitation to be open-minded enough to change your mind. Like what is the invitation that you would have to people to enter into and what would be some of those other conditions that they would have to bring to the table in order to engage into a Socratic inquiry?

[00:47:18.345] Agnes Callard: Yeah, so I think that the way that you're putting it is almost like, what do you say to them? But I think that there's the sort of sociological reflections I was bringing to bear earlier suggest It's not just, what do you say to them? It's like, what room are you in? How do you know them? Why are you in the same space with them? How long do you have in that space? How long do you think you have? You know, who do they think you are? Like I give an example in the book of trying to walk up to people, like sitting in front of the Art Institute in Chicago, when I was a student at the University of Chicago, went downtown to the Art Institute and walking up to people and being like, let's have a philosophy conversation. And it did not work out. They didn't know what I was doing and they were kind of scared of me. And they're like, when is she going to go away? But I don't think the problem was the words I used when I started out to say like, OK, what is art? Why is art important? That wasn't the problem. Those very words could use to start out a philosophy conversation. It's just there's a lot of other stuff that has to be right. And I think to put it in your terms, it's like you have to set up the immersive experience. Now, when can we do that? So I think classrooms are like a big place where we do that. I think that's kind of, there's just a magic to the classroom. There's a magic to the blackboard and how you use the blackboard. And like, I have a lot of like very detailed experience and observations about that particular context. You can... Basically, what I am doing when I'm teaching is I am being the interlocutor and I'm forcing my students to be Socrates. So I'm like, here's an argument. Meditation three, Descartes' proof for the reasons of God. You've all got to believe in God for these reasons unless you can show me which of these premises is false. I mean, a lot of hands are going to shoot up. I suddenly get a bunch of Socrates in that room. So that's one context. But OK, we can't always be in school. Right. And I think a lot of people find ways to reconstruct little bits of school in their lives. You know, there's a forum called Interintellectual doing an event soon. But I think podcasts are actually a kind of reaching after a context like this. Right. There's something interesting about the fact that when you're on a podcast, like I'm on your podcast right now. We don't know each other and we're meeting in this nothing space. Right. We're not like in the same space. Right. Where it's really a meeting of the minds in the sense that what else is meeting of us, right? And that's a kind of frame where people can get kind of inquisitive. And I think, you know, the audience, like it's proved incredibly appealing, right? Like you can have so many podcasts out there and you get so many people listening to them. in this way where people who are, you know, like our age, I think you're younger than me, but you're old enough to remember how certain we all were about the death of radio, like the death of like audio as a means of communication. There was just this period where it's like, no, that's, That was back before we had TV and video, whatever. And it's like we went back to it because of podcasts, because we want to hear people talk. We want to hear them challenge each other. We want to hear them explore ideas. And I think what underlies that is something like an interest in the process of inquiry and a gravitation towards it. once we can find a context where it's okay for it to be happening. But that's really the difficulty is like creating those contexts, those worlds where it's okay for this to be happening. And I think it really is like a very concrete thing where you have to make a new one out of materials and it wouldn't necessarily be clear that it would work and then it just does work. And then all of a sudden everyone starts doing it. And so it's just a matter of like finding more of those things. And I'm constantly exploring to try to find those things. It's like one of my projects is I'm always working in new media, new formats, you know, like what do I have to do to make this social interaction, to make it feel okay in this interaction that we're inquiring into something.

[00:50:53.012] Kent Bye: One of the things I was surprised in reading your book was how you were starting to take the Socratic method and actually start to develop it into its own proper ethical framework, which I was not expecting when I had first saw that you were expanding what you originally talked about in that five-minute video, which I saw you on social media say that one of the publishers from Norton saw that five-minute video and your elaboration of this adversarial division of epistemic labor, this five-minute dispatch helped to make this book even happen. And so you've been- you know, working on that, but also developing it into a full fledged ethical framework. You say at some point that it's beyond the scope of the book to compare it to all the existing other ethical frameworks, but you start to introduce like other ideas like kinship. So your relationship to other people, a family, but also your body. And so that utilitarianism being connected to like trying to optimize the benefit for most people. And, you know, so there's all these things that you're seeing these different trade-offs where some are optimized more towards that bodily aspect and there's other optimized towards the kinship aspect. So if you were to kind of do a quick pitch for the Socratic method as an ethical framework, how would you describe that? I'm sorry if this is an unfair question, but I'm just trying to get a sense of like, how do you start to do the quick pitch of what the Socratic method as a form of ethics might be?

[00:52:15.973] Agnes Callard: Yeah. So I'll tell you first that just the background of like how I got to, I wasn't initially intending to like make it a whole big ethical theory. But what I kept realizing was that there was this very thin reading of the Socratic method where it's like critical thinking. And it's just like, oh, just be open-minded. That was not... capturing Socrates well, and that I felt like actually this is a big part of why Socrates has come off as sort of flat and thin and empty to many of his subsequent interpreters, you know, starting with Aristotle, Cicero, some of his contemporaries as well. I mean, these were not contemporaries of Socrates, but, you know, people closer to Socrates than we are, for sure. And I realized that it was really pretty important that these conversations were part of like an ethical pursuit. Socrates had goals that the conversations were satisfying and he wasn't just having them like for fun or, you know, to mess with people, which is what the thin reading lands you with Socrates the troll. And so then I started to work out, OK, what is the ethics behind talking to people like this? And I developed it into like an ethical system. So what I say in the book is I can, in a way, compare it to some other ethical systems. I just can't tell you which is better. I can show you how it's different. And I don't have the space to tell you which one's better, but I'll like quickly lay out your alternatives. OK, as far as I can tell in the West, like you've got four options. Option number one is that you are utilitarian, which is to say what you're doing is you're employing rationality in a kind of calculative form. to make sure that your motivations would ultimately spring in, I argue, from the sort of commands of your body to keep it alive and other people's bodies, right? To make sure that you're satisfying them in a way that's consistent over time and consistent with the demands of other people. That's what utilitarianism fundamentally is. It's like listening to your body, but in an enlightened way. Your second option is Kantianism, which employs a kind of legalistic or principled form of rationality, which says, don't make exceptions. Don't make an exception of yourself. Follow laws that are the laws for the kind of creature you are, where everybody should treat that situation in the same way if they're in the situation you're in. And so you'll get things like the categorical imperative, act as though your maxim were a universal law of nature. You'll get things like the final formulation of the kingdom, you know, act like you're a member of a community of rational beings governed by a set of laws. Kantianism says, you know, it doesn't say maximize utility. It says treat other people with dignity and respect, even if it doesn't maximize utility and never use any human being as a means, even if the world should explode. Just don't break certain rules. Do your duty. What that really is, is an enlightened version of what I call the kinship command, which is like, behave yourself as a member of the group that you're in. Don't hurt other members of your group. Don't make an exception for yourself. Okay, so that's Kantianism. That's ethical system number two. Those are the two main ones, by the way. I would say like 90% of people in the West are using one of those ethical theories, whether they know it or not, most of the time through their everyday lives. There's a kind of recent like ugly stepchild, which is Aristotelianism, which says maybe we don't need to choose. Maybe we can somehow do what other people like us to do and do what we like to do because we're well brought up enough that what we feel like doing is actually what's good for other people. That is, it's what's good for the members of our group considered as a law, self-regulating, rule-governed group. So that's the risk-discipline. Okay, so these are your three options before I enter the scene, okay? What I'm doing is offering you a fourth option. And, you know, first and foremost, I think my book isn't trying to say it's better than those other three. I just think the very idea that there's an alternative is already just revolutionary, right? That's a big enough job for one book. And what I want to convince you of is this is really is different. It really isn't just some version of the other three. And so we haven't like mapped the whole space of ethics in having these three theories, because here's another one. And maybe there are more is the other thought that I kind of want to be on the table. But the thing that really makes Socratic intellectualism distinctive as an ethical theory is that it tells you that you should be an intellectual. So if you're a Kantian, you don't need to do philosophy. You don't need to read Kant ever if you're a Kantian. You can be a good person. Kant is really clear about this. He's like, my grandmother who couldn't even read, she was perfectly moral. Utilitarians do not think that you need to be able to do the math. Someone else can do the math for you. As long as you donate to charity, whatever, you're a good person. You don't need to read Peter Singer. You don't need to engage in philosophy. And it's actually a problem for a lot of these people because these are the people who are like espousing these views. They're all intellectuals, right? But they have to, in a way, put themselves down. Like, yeah, what I'm doing is not the really important thing. The really important thing is those people out there who's like never even heard of counter mail, but they're like following the rules or maximizing utility. And like, they're the real ethical beings. And the Socratic intellectualist says, no, the thing you're doing when you're thinking about Socrates, that's actually the thing. That's what it is to be a good person. The thing that when you're sort of struggling to think about like what is ethics and how do I be good, that's ethics. And so Socratic intellectualism, you know, Utilitarianism tells you to pursue the maximization of happiness for everyone. And Kantianism tells you to pursue the avoidance of violating your duty and the commands that belong to the kind of preacher you are. And Aristotelianism tells you to pursue what's noble, what's being like a noble and decent and just person. And Socratic ethics tells you to pursue knowledge. And that's a different goal from the other three.

[00:57:41.378] Kent Bye: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for that. Because I think after watching The Good Place and listening to Microshore's book and kind of getting all this, I was like, oh, well, there's a whole other new one that will have to be integrated here in the future as this gets out there and gets introduced and more people start to formalize it in different ways and maybe even apply it to different aspects of tech ethics, because I feel like tech ethics is a... is a big area where there's all these kind of ethical and moral dilemmas that are happening in emerging technologies that I don't necessarily always find existing ethical frameworks are able to kind of elaborate all the different dimensions of privacy and biometrics and AI and all this stuff. Cool. Well, I guess as we wrap up, I always like to ask the people that interview what they see the ultimate potential of VR or these immersive experiences. In your case, I'd love to ask you like what you see the ultimate potential of people fully immersing themselves into Socratic inquiry and what that might be able to enable if you had more and more people doing that.

[00:58:36.615] Agnes Callard: Yeah. So I guess I'll answer like at two levels. So the first level would just be I think humanity is on a quest. Like we're not at the end of the quest. We're like some ways along. That is, there's something we want to achieve. There's something we're trying to do. And that thing that we're trying to do, at least a big part of it is trying to like figure out what's our place in the universe. And like, why are we here? And like, what's our mission? Like part of our quest is figuring out what the quest is. And I think it's just like, if more people took it seriously, we'd make faster progress on it. That is, this is just a really hard job that requires all of us to participate. So that's one level of answer. But the other level of answer is a lot of us have had the experience of finding some activity that, you know, might be like dancing or for me, it was high school debate or whatever, where you're like, oh, this is what I was like supposed to do. You suddenly feel at home in it. You feel like your faculties are being employed to their highest degree. you know, people describe like a flow state or a feeling that they're fully active or fully engaged. And I think that that's what philosophical engagement could be for other people specifically socially. It's sort of like, I think a lot of the times we're just not really sure what we're supposed to do with other people. We know we're supposed to be nice to them, but it's like, you meet up with your friend. You haven't seen them in a while. Okay. You can be like, here's what's happening in my life. What's been happening in your life. We pass that back and forth. What did we achieve? What would that do? What did that do for us? How did that connect us? And I think that philosophical engagement has the potential to like be that thing that makes us feel really connected to one another and makes us feel like we're really making good use of one another. Like this is what socializing is really for.

[01:00:16.448] Kent Bye: Great. Okay. Awesome. Well, Agnes, thanks so much for joining me today on the podcast. I feel like your ideas around the Socratic method have really inspired me and have been like a core baseline for understanding basics of epistemology that I've found myself referencing it in so many different contexts over the last five years. And I'm really happy that you've been able to get the book out there and a real thrill to kind of dive in and unpack all the different aspects. And in terms of like the application to immersive communities, I just want to share one little quick anecdote. Back in if a doc lab in 2022, there was an immersive experience where they paired me up with a 15 year old. And I was asked questions by that 15 year old to imagine the future that they were going to be living into 30 years in the future. And that time I was 45 years old. So I was the age that they were going to be in 30 years. And I had to describe to them in the speculative futures aspect, what the world was going to be. And I had to answer these provocative questions. There was no technology, nothing else, but it was like this real Socratic engagement that was at the heart of what you're talking about in your book. And it was one of the most powerful experiences that I had. So I feel like there's a really huge opportunity for people who are immersive creators, VR, immersive theater makers, to look at what you're writing about and take those principles and transform them into these contrived contexts and immersive contexts to allow people to get a taste of some of what you're talking about with the Socratic method and the Socratic inquiry. So yeah, just a real pleasure to read your book that I've been thinking with you for the last five years. And yeah, just a real thrill for me to have a chance to be able to sit down with you to help break it all down. So thanks again for joining me here on the podcast.

[01:01:54.994] Agnes Callard: Thank you so much for having me.

[01:01:56.675] Kent Bye: So that was Agnes Collard. She's a philosopher at the University of Chicago, and she just published a book called Open Socrates, The Case for Philosophical Life. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, what was just really striking to me to hear about this concept of the Socratic immersive experience and One of the key parts that Agnes is saying is that you get to think with someone else, not someone else think for you, but you actually are actively participating in the co-creation of knowledge together because you're taking on these different roles and you're collaboratively able to think through problems together, which is a unique type of experience overall. There's a lot of preconditions of being willing to let go of some of your perspectives and your worldviews and to have a certain amount of open-mindedness and to surrender into this type of inquiry. And so there's lots of other surrounding aspects of this invitation to enter into this Socratic inquiry and to have these different types of Socratic immersive experiences. And also just that Agnes has done this deep dive into the sociology of conversation to start to unpick some of these unspoken rules for how we engage with each other across these different types of contexts. And that she's trying to really cultivate this philosophical context that happens very naturally in the context of like education, where she's able to engage in that kind of Socratic dialogue there. But in terms of just hanging out with friends or family or trying to create a space for you to have the structures and rules for you to start to engage into this deeper type of philosophical inquiry, which, as Socrates is saying, is like the unexamined life is not worth living. And so a lot of ways, Agnes is trying to put forth a broader ethical framework as well as these structures and rules to kind of flesh out what is the core mechanics of the Socratic inquiry. I did want to unpack a little bit the allusions to process philosophy, which I didn't really explain all that well. And it was something that, you know, I thought, oh, maybe I'll send Agnes all this information to give more context. But at the same time, when I do an interview with someone, it's like I can't really expect them to read or do anything as like homework for them to comment on something that they're not already aware of. And so. So it was a little bit difficult to dive into all those different differentiations of mutually exclusive versus mutually implicative. Just to elaborate that in a little bit because it's something that I've thought about a bit. So Alfred North Whitehead in my conversation with Matt Siegel, he has this way of resolving the mutually exclusive mind versus body. by transforming it into an ongoing process that's unfolding and so things are happening in this abstract mental pole and then they get manifest into the physical pole and so rather than creating this intractable polarity it's become mutually implicative where you can't have the one without the other because it's a part of an unfolding process where you need both sides to really participate so that was the kind of analog that i was trying to get at but The answer that Agnes was saying is that Socrates also sees refutation and construction as a part of two sides of the same coin where they really depend on each other. So it's like rather than seeing different parts of the element, you see the whole elephant. And so in some ways it is implying that there's like this mutually implicative dimension to those two different roles in the context of an unfolding process of the dialectic, you know, believe in truths, avoiding falsehoods, path towards trying to construct knowledge. So that was just the idea is that if you have an intractable polarity that are mutually exclusive, sometimes it can be mutually implicative when you put them in the context of an unfolding process that are both required in order to achieve something. So that was the core idea that I wasn't able to articulate in the moment, but I think it's still important because it's something that I think around a lot, especially in the context of this type of conversation where we're exploring the dialectic of believed truths, avoiding falsehoods. And that the dialectical process is something I see as a core foundational concept idea when you think about experiential design. Because when you're trying to create an immersive experience, you're trying to put people into these contexts, give them choices to take action. And a lot of those choices in action is what type of character traits are you embodying when you're making those choices? As that famous Robert McKee quote, story's all about characters making choices under pressure where you get to see their essential character being revealed. So that's the core idea. And I feel like some of the trends that I've seen in immersive storytelling is that there's more and more of this type of Socratic methodology that's being used within the context of some of these different immersive experiences that I've seen over the years. So definitely check out Open Socrates, The Case for Philosophical Life to dig much more into greater detail than we're able to dig into this conversation. Like I said, it's fleshed out into a full ethical framework, and there's just a lot of elaboration of the core principles and ideas and how it plays out across love and death and politics. And yeah, it's a lot of deep philosophical thoughts, but it's written in a way that should be accessible for the general reader. So that's all I have for today, and I just want to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoyed the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a part of the podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.

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