The Kurty D Show
055 - Cultural Enrichment with Christopher Daradics
Episode Summary
This week, we welcome my brother, Christopher Daradics—a linguist at the University of Oregon. From his strategic post U of O's Center for Applied Second Language Studies (aka CASLS, for you acronym aficionados) to his world-hopping escapades that inspired his graphic memoir "Pocket Guide to Revolution," Christopher's a walking, talking kaleidoscope of cultures and ideas. We dive deep into the space between language, art, and the human experience – brains, hearts, and the whole enchilada. We tiptoe along the tightrope of intercultural communication, ponder the complexities of the extended mind theory, and even offer our respectful take on the Fluxus art movement (we see you, Yoko Ono – still a legend!). By the end, Christopher and I are like two John Lennons strumming air guitars to the melody of our conversation, minds melding with the wonder of intellectual kinship and, of course, a dash of brotherly harmony. So, tune in for a smart and heart-felt sing-along that'll leave you questioning the lyrics of your understanding and perhaps even whistling a brand-new tune.
Episode Notes
Key Takeaways:
- Christopher’s journey and experiences around the world
- Fulbright grants and Christopher’s participation in the organization
- The concept of cultural production and definition of art
- Cultural Production and Language Learning
- Soft Power vs. Hard Power
- Descartes and Computational Theory of Mind
- Extended Mind and Ecological Validity
- The dawn of AI
- Art and Philosophy
- Fluxus and its influence on art, its disruption of traditional art forms and relationships.
- Embracing Complexity
Tweetable Quotes:
- “I think that God is something like the middle voice, and it's something like sunsets.”— Christopher
- “Cognition is not something that's constrained. This is, from the ecological perspective, from the extended theory of mind perspective, cognition is a distributed process.” - Christopher
- “The environment is too complex to control.” — Christopher
- “So, are we fundamentally irrational? I think that there are parts of us that are profoundly irrational and that the rational parts of us have an incredibly difficult time wrapping our rational minds around. But I think that we're also rational.” — Christopher
- “My personal belief is that Descartes was not as dualistic and sort of Cartesian as history has painted him to be.” — Christopher
- “The hardest part about taking a very long trip around the world is leaving; the hardest part is just clearing your calendar enough to get away.” — Christopher
- “Complexity is simple rules playing out at scale. The simplicity and the fullness, and that it's really beautiful to embrace complexity.” - Christopher
- "To engineer something is hard power. Soft power is like cultural influence."— Christopher
- “Mind is not present in the object; it is only present in the subject.” — Christopher
- “Games are an amazing site for practicing, for using language. And then there's fan fiction and all of this stuff. So here's where we're starting to get into this sort of territory of cultural production.” – Christopher
- “So the world is getting more complex, it's getting more dynamic, and the questions emerging are like… It's incredibly non-linear, life is non-linear, and the rightness and wrongness of things has a lot to do with cultural preference like we described before.” - Christopher
- “We have this incredible capacity to process information, and we do it in ways that we absolutely cannot understand.” — Christopher
Links Mentioned: