download (right-click and Save as…)
The idiotplayers podcast is a caravanserai of conversations with important thinkers, be-ers and doers. The idiotplayers podcast aims to explore art, creativity and expression. If there is an elephant standing in the dark, as the Sufi story goes, we want to do more than grope and theorize. We invite conversations with people who aim from the heart to make practical, the far-reaching. Biography 
Anthony Blake (born 1939) studied Physics at Bristol University with David Bohm (see Bohm-Bennett Correspondence 1962-4) and the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge with Gerd Buchdahl. He collaborated with engineer Edward Matchett on Creative Design (numerous papers) and worked with John Allen and the original team that built Biosphere 2 (see Biosphere 2 – the Human Experiment, edited by Blake). With the philosopher-technologist John Bennett, a leading student of the ‘fourth way’ teacher Gurdjieff, and his team he worked on the development of methods of structural thinking called systematics that led to ‘Structural Communication’ (see Kieran Egan, Structural Communication) and ‘LogoVisual Technology’ (LVT for short , see entry in Wikipedia). In 1998 he co-founded the non-profit organisation DuVersity (in the USA) centred on dialogue for which he is Director of Studies (see www.duversity.org). He has authored several books, including the most recent, A Gymnasium of Beliefs in Higher Intelligence. He has worked with leading practitioners of Group Analysis, specifically Patrick de Mare inventor of the ‘Median Group’ and Gordon Lawrence discoverer of the Social Dreaming Matrix, conducting and filming video-conversations with them and others in the field. He has conducted transpersonal psychological seminars in the USA, Europe, Mexico and China as well as conducting training in LVT in the UK, USA, Italy and China. He extended from physics into publishing and from philosophy into psychology but his core interests are dramatic process and dialogue, following the idea of the ‘dramatic universe’ he was introduced to by his main teacher, John Bennett; seeking spirituality in life’s uncertainties.
Index of Topics: The overall theme of the conversation is science; science and mystical experience; who am I? and how do I relate to what I am in the midst of?; thinking requires contradiction to get it moving; mind/matter divide; this “divide” is not to be assumed; understanding is the same in all realms; Roger Bacon; Einstein and Clerk Maxwell’s equations; supreme acts of imagination to see; myths of a higher science that do not tell you how to do it; putting the work in; higher science is a masked appeal to authority; quantum loop gravity and string theory; tools of living or tools in intention; understanding is not from prefabricated parts; do we really look at this inner life?; The Society of Akhaldan; to understand is to understand; make understanding your own by putting it into your own language; Joseph Campbell’s vision quest; in the domain of understanding you must have uniqueness; understanding is not general, but concrete; Nietzsche said, “If thou hast a virtue and it is a real virtue, thou hast it in common with no man; it is thine very own.”; you have to make something; the agora, the marketplace of artefacts; Bayesian statistics, the mathematics of uncertainty; conscious and conscience; CS Lewis’ study of conscience; science is finding out and knowing in a way that you can share this with other people; Cantor’s transfinite numbers; science and business; military industrial complex; a war of purposes; studies of belief mechanisms; sleep and waking sleep; science is an independent means of questioning assumptions; Gurdjieff turned this technique of questioning assumptions onto the study of self; the fulcrum of self-sensing; Gurdjieff says we are not in the physical; we are starting in a dream; attaining one’s real I is just the beginning; Gurdjieff’s views on modern science; we are unaware of how extraordinary ordinary matter is; the greatest literature in the world id concerned with what is most ordinary; verification; science has to do with falsification, not verification; the value of cognitive dissonance; Bayesian statistics; mis-reading The Dramatic Universe; systematics; the present moment: the field of action over will; what’s the probability that I have a soul?; placing our bets; working on a new book on number and pattern;