Curiosity ⇔ Entangled

About Curiosity ⇔ Entangled

Curiosity ⇔ Entangled brings together two experts from different fields for unscripted conversations fueled by mutual curiosity. Each episode explores intersections of science, technology, philosophy, and humanity, diving into topics like the origins of life, artificial intelligence, ancient and modern history, and the mysteries of the cosmos. These unique dialogues create opportunities for the cross-pollination of ideas, sparking new insights and innovation. Join us to discover where curiosity can lead. Produced by Accelerator Media, a nonprofit organization www.acceleratormedia.org

Publisher

Accelerator Media

Category

science

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

16 Jan 2025

Latest episode

19 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

22 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   19 Oct 2026

   Artificial Life: Can We Control What We Create? | Oron Catts & Sarah Collins

   What happens when we try to engineer life, and why do the things we create so often unsettle us? Bioartist Oron Catts joins cultural historian and musicologist Sarah Collins to explore artificial life, automation, and the desire to control living systems. Drawing on their book Artificial Life: The Art of Automating Living Systems, co-written with Elizabeth Stephens and Ionat Zurr, they examine how art, science, literature, and technology shape our ideas about what is natural, what is artificial, and what it means to be alive. Their conversation moves from SymbioticA’s experiments with living materials and lab-grown meat to the history of musical aesthetics, the relationship between autonomy and automation, and competing views of life as a machine or something that escapes control. They discuss how artistic critique can become a commercial promise, why technological breakthroughs are repeatedly presented as if they have no history, and what gets hidden behind visions of abundance without consequences—from the resources needed to sustain cells in a laboratory to the human labor behind AI. From there, they turn to artificial wombs, the spectacle of early infant incubators, and the stories we tell about creations that take on lives of their own. Through Frankenstein, the Golem, and Catts’s search for traces of fiction in the Orkney Islands, they ask whether the answer to a technological problem is always another technology, and what cultural anxiety can reveal about our hopes for the future. Three core questions: What do we mean when we call something “artificial” or “alive,” and why are both words so hard to pin down? Why do we keep promising ourselves technologies that deliver abundance without consequences? What do stories like Frankenstein and the Golem reveal about our desire for control and our fear of losing it? ——— GUESTS Oron Catts - Artist, Researcher, and Curator Director, Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Western Australia Co-founder of SymbioticA and the Tissue Culture and Art Project Co-author of Tissues, Cultures, Art and Artificial Life: The Art of Automating Living Systems https://tcaproject.net/about/ (https://tcaproject.net/about/) Sarah Collins - Cultural Historian and Musicologist Professor and Chair of Musicology, UWA Conservatorium of Music Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and 2024 Dent Medal recipient Author of Lateness and Modernism and The Aesthetic Life of Cyril Scott https://www.uwa.edu.au/schools/music/sarah-collins (https://www.uwa.edu.au/schools/music/sarah-collins) THE BOOK Artificial Life: The Art of Automating Living Systems Oron Catts, Sarah Collins, Elizabeth Stephens, and Ionat Zurr (UWA Publishing, Vignettes series) https://uwap.uwa.edu.au/products/artificial-life-the-art-of-automating-living-systems (https://uwap.uwa.edu.au/products/artificial-life-the-art-of-automating-living-systems) ——— Chapters 00:00 Meet Oron Catts and Sarah Collins 03:26 The book and the beginnings of SymbioticA 08:42 Making strange and the slippery meaning of “artificial” and “life” 14:54 Schiller, absolute music, and the longing for immediate experience 23:02 Keeping disciplines intact in art and science 29:53 Lab-grown meat from art critique to venture capital 35:50 Mechanism, vitalism, and cultural amnesia 44:49 Frankenstein and the myth of the magical lab 52:31 Illusion, staging, and hidden labor 54:36 Artificial wombs and outsourcing the body 1:01:23 Golems, Pinocchio, and why life resists control 1:08:28 Searching the Orkney Islands for Frankenstein’s lost creature 1:20:21 The Golem of Prague and ending on optimistic anxiety

2. 

   25 Sept 2026

   Is the Mind Only in the Brain? | Lambros Malafouris & Shaun Gallagher

   Where does the mind end, and how much of who we are is made through our relationships with the world around us? Cognitive archaeologist Lambros Malafouris joins philosopher Shaun Gallagher to explore a view of the mind that reaches beyond the brain. Drawing on Malafouris's Material Engagement Theory and Gallagher's work on embodied and enactive cognition, they examine how thinking emerges through the ongoing relationship between brain, body, other people, objects, technologies, and the environments we inhabit. Their conversation explores the four E's of cognition—embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive—why objects and materials may participate in human agency, the relationship between pottery and the potter who shapes it, how our brains and environments change together, and how technologies become part of the processes that make us who we are. From there, they turn to AI and ask what happens when technologies change faster than we can understand their effects on us: how digital systems reshape habits and institutions, what skills may disappear along the way, and whether changing our everyday practices may matter as much as changing the rules that govern technology. Three core questions: Does cognition happen inside the brain, or emerge through relationships between brain, body, other people, and the material world? If tools and technologies help shape our agency, habits, and sense of self, what happens when those technologies change? As AI becomes embedded in everyday life and institutions, how do we preserve the embodied practices and ways of thinking we still value? ——— GUESTS Lambros Malafouris - Cognitive & Anthropological Archaeologist Professor of Cognitive & Anthropological Archaeology, University of Oxford Tutorial Fellow in Archaeology and Anthropology, Hertford College Developer of Material Engagement Theory and author of People Are STRANGE: Material Engagement and the Creation of Self-Consciousness https://www.hertford.ox.ac.uk/staff/lambros-malafouris/ (https://www.hertford.ox.ac.uk/staff/lambros-malafouris/) https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262553902/people-are-strange/ (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262553902/people-are-strange/) Shaun Gallagher - Philosopher & Cognitive Scientist Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy, University of Memphis Known for his work on embodied cognition, phenomenology, agency, intersubjectivity, and the Pattern Theory of Self https://www.memphis.edu/philosophy/people/ (https://www.memphis.edu/philosophy/people/) https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/facpubs/6153/ (https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/facpubs/6153/) ——— Chapters 00:00 Meet Lambros Malafouris and Shaun Gallagher 02:38 The four E's: embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive cognition 09:05 Material Engagement Theory: how things shape the mind 16:34 What scientific models leave out 19:14 The situated person and the relational mind 23:35 Where does agency actually live? 28:44 Agency, body ownership, and the minimal self 30:25 The potter, the clay, and agency in the relationship 35:23 STRANGE, metaplasticity, and how humans become 44:03 What London taxi drivers reveal about brains and technology 46:05 Three kinds of technological transparency 49:34 What are our technologies doing to us? 50:55 AI, human becoming, and the technologies we choose 56:00 The socially extended mind and how institutions shape us 59:26 When digital technologies become the structure of institutions 1:03:04 Habits, practices, and another way to think about change 1:09:50 What embodied skills could we lose in the age of AI? 1:12:19 From pottery to politics: where the conversation leads

3. 

   15 Aug 2026

   Sara Imari Walker x Amy Karle | Life, Time, Creativity and the Future

   What is life, and how much say do we have in shaping what comes next? Astrobiologist and theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker joins artist and futurist Amy Karle to explore the questions they each reach from opposite directions: what life is, how it begins, and how we would recognize it somewhere else. Drawing on Walker's search for the physics and possible laws of life and Karle's art made with the tools of frontier science and biotechnology, they find where a scientist's attempt to see life differently meets an artist's attempt to help us feel possibilities we do not yet have language for. Their conversation explores time and how differently each of us lives it, possibility versus probability, creativity as a force that shapes the world, the traces we leave for the future, bioprinting and what we become when we remake the body, how a work changes as different cultures receive it, and the question of what part we play in the universe's ongoing creativity. Three core questions: 1. What does it mean to be alive, and how would we recognize life radically unlike our own? 2. Can genuinely new possibilities emerge, or is the future fundamentally constrained by the past and by probability? 3. Is the universe itself creative, and what role do life, intelligence, and human agency play in that creative process? ——— GUESTS Sara Imari Walker - Astrobiologist & Theoretical Physicist Professor and Deputy Director, Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Arizona State University Author of Life as No One Knows It and co-developer of Assembly Theory https://search.asu.edu/profile/1731899 (https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUM4Zm9rVDVkOVNkaWhoR3NlS2Ffa3JCZ1N0ZXxBR3JiS2FrcG5lenJwVTF4TW44dkpMZWhuN2ZhSjJVMFA1LXRDTWY4dk1oazAtSHNOeTR3dnVBdElBQjMyb1Y3S1praVdobjBoYnE3elpkcDlmNzAwMmNLYWlTX0EwZmh2ZEM4&q=https%3A%2F%2Fsearch.asu.edu%2Fprofile%2F1731899&v=29rukq4c-Ds) https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/bo... (https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUM4Zm9rU1pVMmt2a0RjaF9Mb0daek5JWjQ5cnxBR3JiS2Fsa1pybWd4QVVqYXVXZTktaUVDWVdISkVaZWVuWGhOR3RtNGdIUlotbEwzYTRJaThBWHNuVUQ1dEJ4My1MV1FvUWh0ODZ2SDhNeG0yMFhITjNnWEF5TTJodGhjaGlO&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.penguinrandomhouse.com%2Fbooks%2F646981%2Flife-as-no-one-knows-it-by-sara-imari-walker%2F&v=29rukq4c-Ds) Amy Karle - Artist, Bioartist & Futurist Known for Regenerative Reliquary and The Heart of Evolution Exhibited at Ars Electronica, the Centre Pompidou, and the Mori Art Museum https://www.amykarle.com (https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUM4Zm9rVGlPcXdlMVJ5WW5EUG1yVUpFM19nUXxBR3JiS2FuTjEtVDVTT1dJYU1YRnc0NURqbWdHaGVBcjFtVmU0RmtNX3ZGQW1fVU5SdGh0SlhUQ0ZHNmtDWG1iYk5WWVVxTmE4d29HZnlpaXZSSHQ1YVFNNHZWZG9iWlYyY01l&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amykarle.com%2F&v=29rukq4c-Ds) ——— Chapters 00:00 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29rukq4c-Ds) Meet Sara Imari Walker and Amy Karle 01:14 What does it mean to be alive? 04:41 The futures cone, and how much we shape what comes 07:33 Possibility, probability, and the outliers that surprise us 10:40 Living out of the past, or starting from a blank slate 16:28 Echoes from the Valley of Existence: leaving DNA on the Moon 23:04 Our very different relationships to time 42:07 Powers of Ten, and seeing clearly in the AI age 47:48 What would alien life be, and how would we know it? 58:06 Amy's beginning, and the fragility of life 1:04:37 The Heart of Evolution, and who we become when we remake the body 1:08:40 Scary and beautiful: how cultures complete the work 1:18:15 Perception, and our role in the universe's creativity

Who has been a guest on Curiosity ⇔ Entangled

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Robin Hanson
• Joe Henrich
• Daniel H Wilson
• Eric Anctil
• Bernardo Kastrup

Podcast Authority Score: 14 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

10

Social presence

90

YouTube

0

Engagement

0

Contact Curiosity ⇔ Entangled

Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

Shows with a similar audience

• 

  Adventures in Awareness

• 

  Curious on Earth podcast

• 

  Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal

• 

  Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

• 

  Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch

• 

  Dwarkesh Podcast