B. Scot Rousse (“B”)'s substack, "Without Why," focuses on what it means to be alive in an age of intelligent machines. He is philosopher in residence at Topos Institute and visiting scholar in Philosophy at Berkeley. He also drums in 3 punk bands.
Andrea Hiott has a conversation with philosopher B. Scot Rousse (“B”). B is an Oakland-based, Berkeley-affiliated Heidegger and phenomenology scholar focused on AI’s effects on our capacities to care. He is also a Topos Institute affiliate and a punk drummer.
Andrea and B discuss Heidegger’s care as living in “meaningful differences,” embodied affordances, moods, and existential orientation. They explore how AI risks compulsive optimization and an overly narrow picture of the role of language in human life. B argues that technologies design ways of being human, urges users and designers to ask “for the sake of what,” articulates punk’s embodied, communal, joyful “controlled chaos” as an antidote to technological nihilism, and celebrates love and care in their visceral, pluralistic, and risky uncontrollability.
Along the way, B traces a path from growing up Hare Krishna in Florida, to an encounter with a philosophy teacher who encouraged his transfer to UC Berkeley where he came under the mentorship of Hubert Dreyfus, whose teaching and critiques of symbolic AI shaped B’s work.
B also shares about his work with philosopher-entrepreneur Fernando Flores (thanks to an introduction by Dreyfus), who applies philosophy to organizational “networks of conversations” that coordinate commitments and care for customer concerns, drawing on his experience in Chilean political history and ontological reinterpretation of entrepreneurship. In all of these experiences, B focuses on an abiding and urgent question: How do we protect our capacity to care in an age of optimization? How can you create, in your life, your version of the worldly joy and shared meaning of being in a punk band?
B’s substack is Without Why. He currently drums in the bands Realistic, Vexxyl, and Wildfire.
Subscribe to B’s YouTube channel here. Support the Hubert Dreyfus Audio Archive Project here.
00:00 Welcome and Care Question
00:36 Meet B Scot Rousse
04:31 Highlights and Themes
07:08 B Introduces Himself
08:14 From Krishna Roots to Philosophy
10:27 Teacher to Berkeley and Dreyfus
12:01 Ambassadors of Possibility
13:16 Dreyfus Mentorship Years
14:52 Fernando Flores and Careful Organizations
18:40 Heideggerian Care Meets AI
23:56 Care and Agency in Analytic Ethics
30:04 Mattering and Affordances
33:13 Dreyfus on Technology and Optimization
38:00 Language as Commitments Not Info
39:02 Language as Commitment
40:54 Why LLMs Aren’t Human Language
43:18 Training, Deployment, Disembodiment
45:22 Languaging vs Symbol Systems
49:44 Care and Ontological Design
52:41 Compulsive Chatbot Loops
55:30 Disorientation and No Recipes
01:02:10 Kierkegaard and Commitment
01:11:35 Practicing Conversation with AI
01:14:38 Punk as Embodied Community
01:17:46 Punk As Belonging
01:18:50 Drummer Life And Community
01:19:14 Mood Joy And Chaos
01:21:10 Entropy And AI Randomness
01:23:19 Choosing The Wild Path
01:27:01 Teaching At The Edge
01:33:01 Meaning Is Out There
45:45 Care As Human Intelligence
01:36:24 Many Loves Music Refuge
01:43:19 Nihilism And Reviving Care
01:45:21 Closing Links And Thanks
Read more of B’s Substack Posts here:
CLIPS:
Full show without intro:
Technology, Nihilism, and Giving a Damn: Part I, Part II, Part III
Past episodes of Love and Philosophy
#84 There is No Average Individual: The Great Psychology Delusion with Marek McGann
"Human beings…all individually change over time. We do things differently as individuals, and differently from context to context — let alone different people doing the same thing in different conditions."
Andrea’s ‘ramblings’ in Waymaking on Harry Frankfurt and more, as inspired from this conversation: Magic Circles Never Close
You can now preorder Andrea’s next book:
Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness
Preorder now to explore landscapes of the mind ❣️ Available to preorder worldwide soon, still mostly in Europe and UK for now.
“Hiott asks us to become the contrasts and bifurcations without dismissing them, a provocative and important philosophical contribution via cognitive neuroscience. This is a real tour de force.”
—by Bernardo Kastrup, philosopher, author of more than seven books, and computer scientist
“When John O’Keefe and I wrote our book in the 1970s, we knew we were putting forward something radical, that the hippocampus creates cognitive maps for navigating space. At first this seemed to many to be at odds with memory research but over the years, we’ve started to see this apparent conflict resolve. This book shows us how the field of hippocampal research may be positioning us for a shift in how we understand the mind itself.”
—by Lynn Nadel, neuroscientist and co-author of The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map
“A genuinely original contribution to philosophy via cognitive neuroscience. Hiott demonstrates that holding contradictions open is not intellectual weakness but scientific enlightenment. This is an enriching and essential read (that uses all my favourite words). Hiott’s framework offers something rare—a way to honour both the mathematical precision of computational neuroscience and the irreducible reality of lived experience. Her concept of ‘way-making’ is a universal and philosophical notion that speaks to the existential imperatives of active inference: namely, how organisms minimize surprise by navigating spaces both physical and conceptual. Hippocampal research provides compelling evidence that memory and navigation do not call for reconciliation—they disclose existential processes operating across scales we are only starting to fathom.”
—by Karl Friston, neuroscientist and initiator of the Free Energy Principle
Thanks for listening.
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