Episode 293: Who Is the Dreamer? (Borges' "The Circular Ruins")
Very Bad Wizards
Tamler Sommers & David Pizarro
4.8 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 24 September 2024
⏱️ 86 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
David and Tamler crawl up a riverbank, kiss the mud, and dream a discussion of Borges’ “The Circular Ruins.” We sort through various interpretations and allusions, the story as a metaphor for artistic creation, gnostic cosmology, solipsism, eternal recursion, and the unstable boundary between reality and illusion. How does Borges fit all of this and much more in a 5 page story?
Plus, Scientific American endorses Kamala Harris – is that a big deal? We look at a study purporting to show that Nature’s Biden endorsement eroded trust in science among Trump supporters.
Political endorsement by Nature and trust in scientific expertise during COVID-19 [nature.com]
The Circular Ruins by Jorge Luis Borges [wikipedia.org]
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and a psychologist Dave Pizarro, |
| 0:06.0 | having an informal discussion about issues and science and ethics. |
| 0:09.4 | Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes. |
| 0:17.0 | For one brief moment I felt the heartbeat of creation and it was one with my own. |
| 0:22.0 | We all feel like that all the time, but you don't hear us gassing on about it. The waiting us has spoken. |
| 0:34.0 | Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. |
| 0:41.0 | Who are you? A very bad man. I'm a very good man. |
| 0:47.0 | Good man. Good man. |
| 1:07.0 | Anybody can have a brain. You're a very bad man. |
| 1:11.0 | I'm a very good man, just a very bad wizard. |
| 1:16.0 | Welcome to very bad Wizards. |
| 1:17.0 | I'm Tamler Summers from the University of Houston. |
| 1:20.0 | Dave, we are like the dreamer who dreams and lives inside the dream. |
| 1:26.8 | But who is the dreamer? |
| 1:29.8 | Oh, that's a good question. |
| 1:33.3 | You're in Nate Silver's dream. |
| 1:35.0 | That's what you are. |
| 1:35.9 | I'm his fucking nightmare. |
| 1:37.6 | I'm gonna take him and all of his ill-k down |
| 1:41.8 | in my next book. |
| 1:43.0 | You're Nate Silver's nightmare after he had like a bad burrito one night, you know? |
| 1:47.0 | I'm his Kaiser Assosay. |
... |
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