#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 avoiderror,—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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yjjYq-Z-z0 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 mut