Anagoge Podcast

Can consciousness remain when the sense of self dissolves? Philosopher Jason K. Day examines ego dissolution through the phenomenology of psychedelic experience. Drawing on trip reports and his work with Dan Zahavi, he argues that experiences described as selfless can retain a radically minimal form of self-awareness. We discuss why careful description should precede explanation, the limits of psychedelic questionnaires, and what changes in attention reveal about the structure of experience.
The conversation also explores DMT entity encounters and the difficulty of separating description from interpretation. Day questions claims that psychedelics expand consciousness or provide privileged access to knowledge, discusses the relationship between Husserl and Buddhist philosophy, and explains the value of learning to grip experience without clinging to certainty. We close with drug policy, communal support, and a discussion of whether recreational play and public life can be sacred.
TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 - Start
0:03:16 - Why Phenomenology Matters
0:07:19 - The Psychedelic Style of Experience
0:15:15 - Description Before Theory and Measurement
0:20:42 - Studying Psychedelic Trip Reports
0:32:16 - Rethinking Attention and Salience
0:44:56 - Gurwitsch's Field of Consciousness
0:50:37 - Restructuring Experience, Meaning and Possibility
1:02:34 - Bad Trips, Agency and Skill
1:09:17 - Knowledge, Ego Dissolution and Selfhood
1:20:24 - DMT Entities and Interpretive Limits
1:33:39 - Phenomenological Interviewing and Dialogue
1:37:58 - Husserl, Buddhism and Non-Clinging
1:48:47 - Drug Policy and Communal Support
1:52:57 - Sacredness, Play and Public Life
KEY INSIGHTS & TRANSCRIPT:
https://tiagovf.com/posts/podcast-selfhood-and-psychedelic-phenomenology-with-jason-k-day
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MUSIC CREDIT
Intro song by Lief Sjostrom, titled "Peril," from the album Impossible Parade.
Website: https://liefsjostrom.com/
Album: https://liefsjostrom.bandcamp.com/album/impossible-parade

Finnish philosopher and psychologist Jussi Jylkkä describes a mystical experience he had years before entering psychedelic research and explains the metaphysical agnosticism he developed from it. All metaphysical isms, he argues, are language games. Worldviews are like eyeglasses that become visible only when we learn to see them as models. Classical mystics overreach when they convert their experiences into claims about the ultimate nature of reality.
After we finished recording, Jussi contacted me because he felt that he had not been completely honest. Rather than replace the original conversation, we recorded a second part. Jussi discusses his Christian faith, his decision to join the Lutheran Church, and an experience in which he saw physical reality as the body of Christ. We then consider whether his philosophical agnosticism can coexist with personal faith, and whether Christianity offers an account of morality and spiritual direction that his earlier position lacked.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Meet Jussi Jylkkä
01:39 A Mystical Experience Without Drugs
07:06 Psychedelics Revealed Nothing New
12:49 Why Metaphysics Becomes Wordplay
20:44 Beyond Physicalism and Idealism
33:19 When Models Become Idols
45:11 Are Animals Already Enlightened?
48:24 The Zen Path
58:15 Knowing Reality Through Being
1:09:11 Compassion Without Morality
1:16:59 When Mystics Claim Too Much
1:39:21 AI as a Cognitive Mirror
1:45:11 Why Jussi Returned
1:49:33 Hiding His Christian Faith
1:51:14 Reality as Christ's Body
2:03:09 Why Christianity Resonated
2:16:04 Pantheism and the Fall
2:23:36 Convincing His Younger Self
READ & LISTEN
Read the key insights and full transcript:
https://tiagovf.com/posts/podcast-apophatic-mysticism-idolatry-and-the-limits-of-metaphysics-with-jussi-jylkka
FOLLOW
https://substack.com/@tiagovf
https://www.instagram.com/tiagobooks/
MUSIC CREDIT
Intro song by Lief Sjostrom, titled "Peril," from the album Impossible Parade.
Website: https://liefsjostrom.com/
Album: https://liefsjostrom.bandcamp.com/album/impossible-parade

John Vervaeke returns to the podcast 5 years later to argue that the modern war between science and religion was always a mistake. A cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto, he makes the case that his own field needs religious studies: the first generation of the cognitive science of religion tried to explain religion away, smuggling in an unexamined naturalism and treating believers as defective. Vervaeke reframes religion not as a set of beliefs about a supernatural object but as a comprehensive orientation to meaning that the sciences themselves quietly presuppose. 
The conversation ranges across relevance realization, the mystery of meaning as a Heisenberg-like complementarity of truth and relevance, his identity as a "Zen Neoplatonist," and the "semiotic symbiosis" by which traditions merge and correct one another. He closes on how someone in his position guards against becoming a guru, and on what, exactly, he means by God.
Subscribe to the newsletter: https://substack.com/@tiagovf 
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Introduction
1:28 Cognitive science as intellectual pilgrimage
14:38 Why cognitive science needs religious studies
27:30 Science, truth and relevance
36:50 Neoplatonism and the return to the sacred
51:18 Where Zen meets Neoplatonism
1:02:00 How religions and gods emerge
1:08:47 Criticism, reading and living between worlds
1:20:09 Religion beyond belief
1:35:12 The dangers of becoming a guru
1:47:28 Poetry and life mistakes
1:50:17 Underrated thinkers, self-deception and God
 
READ 
Key insights and the full transcript here: https://tiagovf.com/posts/podcast-zen-neoplatonism-and-the-nature-of-reality-with-john-vervaeke
FOLLOW
https://www.instagram.com/tiagobooks/
MUSIC CREDIT
Intro song by Lief Sjostrom, titled Peril, from the album 'Impossible Parade' 
Website: https://liefsjostrom.com/ 
Album: https://liefsjostrom.bandcamp.com/album/impossible-parade

Most people take it for granted that consciousness is the one thing science cannot explain. Julian Kiverstein thinks the problem has been set up backwards from the start. Rather than beginning with dead, inert matter and asking how it could ever give rise to experience, he inverts the question: start from lived experience, which is where phenomenology begins, and then ask how the physical world fits inside it. From that single move he rebuilds the story of how mind emerges from life, and argues the notorious "hard problem" looks far less intractable once you stop trying to squeeze consciousness out of physics.
An Assistant Professor of Neurophilosophy at the University of Amsterdam, Kiverstein has spent his career closing the gap between scientific explanation and first-person experience, working across phenomenology, 4E cognitive science, and psychiatry. We get into his Skilled Intentionality Framework and his account of affordances, the idea that the possibilities the world offers us are neither purely subjective nor purely objective but relational, arising between a living being and its environment. He makes the case that the brain is not literally a computer, only usefully modelled as one, and that treating the model as the reality is a fallacy of misplaced concreteness. There is no rain inside a weather simulation, and by the same logic no computation literally happening inside the skull.
TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Start
0:00:48 Meet Julian Kiverstein: A Career Between Disciplines
0:08:02 Why Varela's "Embodied Mind" Changed Everything
0:12:18 Does Phenomenology Dissolve the Hard Problem?
0:19:59 Where Does Consciousness Begin? Panpsychism vs Biopsychism
0:27:42 The Zombie Objection: Sense-Making "With the Lights Out"?
0:31:24 Sentience vs Sense-Making: A Smaller Gap Than You Think
0:35:54 Hans Jonas, Metabolism & the Origin of a Point of View
0:41:23 Starting From Consciousness, Not Physics
0:46:10 Neutral Monism & the Self-World Relation
0:51:32 Intentionality & the Birth of Skilled Intentionality
0:57:46 Dreyfus, AI & Why Computers Can't Cope
1:05:28 Was Dreyfus Faithful to Heidegger? Where He Went Wrong
1:15:52 Gibson, Affordances & Direct Perception
1:22:01 Is It Really Metaphysics, or Just Context?
1:30:01 Relational Realism: Salt, Solubility & the World We Know
1:36:02 Is the Mind a Computer? Models vs Reality
1:46:44 Marr, Whitehead & the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness
1:53:33 What Is Information? Bateson, Genes & Purpose
1:57:38 From Survival to Flourishing: Psychedelics & Unselfing
2:06:11 Living in Your Head While Studying the Body
2:13:31 What Keeps Him Up at Night: Philosophy Back Into Life
READ 
Key insights and the full transcript here: https://tiagovf.com/posts/podcast-affordances-embodiment-and-the-hard-problem-with-julian-kiverstein
FOLLOW
https://substack.com/@tiagovf 
https://www.instagram.com/tiagobooks/
MUSIC CREDIT
Intro song by Lief Sjostrom, titled Peril, from the album 'Impossible Parade' 
Website: https://liefsjostrom.com/ 
Album: https://liefsjostrom.bandcamp.com/album/impossible-parade

The danger of AI, Allister Lee argues, is not that it lies to you but that it flatters you. A PhD candidate at the University of Exeter, Allister applies the phenomenology of Edith Stein to the failures of chatbots, coining "sycophantasy" for the way AI offers the form of empathy while lacking its substance: real otherness, real friction, real resistance. Without an "other" who can push back, recursive self-reflection becomes a closed loop that slides toward what the literature calls AI psychosis.
But Allister resists pure pessimism. AI is a "negative tool," a photographic negative that develops a hidden image of the intellectual vices we already had, and so hands us a reason to cultivate virtue and, above all, to recover wonder: the capacity to sit with not-knowing that drives all genuine inquiry. Along the way we get into friction as the mark of the real, whether the sacred can survive Heidegger's "enframing," and his essay on nostalgia and the "eternalisation of the present."
Note: Allister misspoke. Edith Stein first studied under Husserl in Göttingen, not Freiburg.
**TIMESTAMPS**
0:00 Start

1:24 Allister's work

2:23 Mass solitude and Edith Stein

4:44 Empathy as perception

12:11 Awe and the hidden depth of the other

18:40 Sycophantasy, AI flattery, AI psychosis, and the missing friction

31:09 Friction and the loss of the real

35:19 AI as a "negative tool" and Heidegger's enframing

41:07 Can we still perceive the sacred?

48:01 Wonder and sitting with not knowing

53:36 The child, instrumentalization, and unselfing

1:00:07 The aesthetics of nostalgia and the eternal present
**READ & LISTEN**
Read key insights and the full transcript here:
https://tiagovf.com/posts/podcast-edith-stein-empathy-and-the-loss-of-wonder-with-allister-lee
**FOLLOW**
https://substack.com/@tiagovf
https://www.instagram.com/tiagobooks/
**MUSIC CREDIT**
Intro song by Lief Sjostrom, titled Peril, from the album 'Impossible Parade'
Website: https://liefsjostrom.com/
Album: https://liefsjostrom.bandcamp.com/album/impossible-parade